Review by Booklist Review
Title: How Art Makes You Feel: Lauren Soloy's Tove and the Island with No AddressDek: Soloy's picture book inspired by the life of Tove Jansson offers an off-kilter but deeply revealing picture of the artist's work.The best picture-book biographies of visual artists both introduce the facts of an artist's life and evoke some essential quality of their work. For example, Mara Rockliff and Melissa Sweet's Signs of Hope (2024), about Sister Corita Kent's exuberant pop art, contains dozens of clippings from newspaper and magazine ads, encouraging readers to find meaning in the everyday, just like Kent did in her signature prints. Or take Jake Makes a World (2015), by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Christopher Myers, which emphasizes both in the story and in the stunning artwork the bold colors and shapes Jacob Lawrence saw as a child growing up in Harlem, which made their way into his striking paintings.But what happens when you take away the facts of an artist's life and focus instead on just the essential quality of her art? You'd have Lauren Soloy's entrancing Tove and the Island with No Address, inspired by the art and childhood stories of painter and cartoonist Tove Jansson, creator of the beloved Moomins comics.This book is not, in fact, a biography. The story follows young Tove as she and her family arrive at their rustic cabin on a remote, rocky island. One predawn morning, the girl is compelled to strike out into the wilderness in search of "dangerous things, boring things, digging things, exploring things." On her sojourn, she visits an odd creature in a cave who's overwhelmed by his five wild, tiny daughters. Tove offers to take the girls on a walk, but a vicious wind takes the daughters, along with Tove's coat and all her collected treasures, into the craggy corners of the island, where they're caught in the island's skeleton tree. In thick-lined brush strokes and dense, stormy colors, Soloy stirringly captures the sudden onslaught of rain and wind that sends Tove, finally, back to her family's warm cabin, where a cozy sweater and steaming pancakes await.There are hints of Jansson's real life, here: she did spend just about every summer on remote, rocky, windswept islands, living both at odds with and adoring the wildness of nature. Outside of the back matter, however, this is undoubtedly a work of fiction. And yet, Soloy adeptly echoes Jansson's work, from the Moomin-like tale, filled with strangely shaped and unruly creatures, to the color palette, which in her artist's statement she says is "inspired by a Tove Jansson painting." Taking pieces of Jansson's wildly varied body of work, from the colors and moods to the wildness of the setting to the fantastical, unruly, and strangely shaped creatures, Soloy has skillfully distilled them into one story that at once feels both like Jansson's boldly colored abstract paintings and her sharply funny, delightfully irreverent cartoons. It's a tidy bit of alchemy Soloy pulls off here, invoking the animating spirit and atmosphere of Jansson's artwork without merely replicating her style and aesthetics.While Soloy's picture book likely won't be useful for a report writer, it's nonetheless an inventive and inviting way to introduce Jansson and her work to young readers. They might not get a concrete chronology of her life (which is genuinely fascinating), but they will come away with an understanding of what was important to her art and the emotional core of her creative life. The best part of art is how and what it makes us feel, and a picture book about an artist that skips past the facts of biography and manages to successfully cultivate the feeling of experiencing that artist's work is a bit of magic worth treasuring, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Soloy (A Tulip in Winter) doesn't so much directly recount an episode from the life of Moomin creator Tove Jansson (1914--2001) as contemplate Jansson's world, a place that here seems to morph between the real and the imaginary. When Tove is seven, she, her parents, and her baby sibling voyage to the island "with no address" where they summer every year. "There were very few people on the island but no shortage of things to do. Dangerous things, boring things, digging things, exploring things...." Digital spreads in stormy earth tones employ splashes of red for Tove's boots and startling yellow for her hair. The first morning, she awakens early to visit her secret friend, a small, hairy, grotto-dwelling creature whose five obstreperous, shell-size daughters cause endless trouble. Tove takes the five onionlike beings to the beach, but they're almost immediately blown away in a gale. The adventure channels the darkly mischievous tone for which Jansson's works are beloved ("She tucked the girls into her pocket, where they couldn't bite her") and re-creates the strange, wild atmosphere of the island in this windblown tribute to the creator's artistry and sensibility. Ages 4--7. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In this tribute to the life of Moomin author Tove Jansson, a young girl pursues five naughty, troll-like creatures. Tove arrives at her summer home, where Moomin-like drawings adorn the wall. She begins exploring the striking yet desolate island, a prominent setting in Jansson's life and work. Here, the semi-biographical elements diverge into a fantasy that, per Soloy's author's note, was "inspired by Tove's life and the stories she wrote about her own childhood" (readers will need to consult the backmatter to make that connection). Tove visits a friend--a small, hairy brown creature--to care for his five wild daughters, all "tiny as shells." A gust of wind blows the youngsters away, and Tove follows, picking up treasures and musing about the island's mercurial nature before finally locating the wayward girls. She returns home, soaked but satisfied, to her mother's warm sweater and "piping hot pancakes." The narrative is pleasingly crisp yet contemplative; Soloy describessalvageas "a gift the sea gives you" and asks readers to "imagine never getting soaked to the bone and then getting dry again…How dreadful!" But it's her rugged, elemental digital illustrations that steal the show. Thick black outlining and gorgeous, darkly atmospheric, Jansson-inspired backgrounds of stormy skies and sea contrast against slashes of light and warm, colorful domestic scenes. All readers will find the handsome illustrations a wonder, while Tove Jansson enthusiasts will adore the homage.(Picture book. 4-9) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
