Figuring that the Patriots are going to find a way to win this game no matter how far they’re down (looking at you Tom Brady) I opted to get something productive done and post my third blog post. That said, the book I choose for this assignment was The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant (author) and Melissa Sweet (illustrator) a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book.
Initially I was going to blog about Blackout by John Rocco but realizing Mary and I had blogged about the same book for our second blog post (The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat) I decided to select a different book so that I could present Blackout at next Tuesday’s class and still have another book to present should we be asked to present our blog #3 books.
That said, I came across this book after searching through the Caldecott Award and Honor Books web page and recognized the word thesaurus in the book’s title. After a quick look inside on Amazon I decided to request it from my library and after a few days it arrived.
According to the book notes the illustrations in the book “were created with water color, collage, and mixed media”, and as a result the book has a very Lemony Snicket feel to it. While our textbook describes mixed media as “a combination of media in the same book” (Galda & Cullinan, 2017, p. 77) I am not sure whether the publishers mean the book used water color and collage and mix media or whether the mix media label is because water color and collage were used. Either way, the book is very beautifully done.
When you first open the book you see that the front end pages are decorated in a hodgepodge of different paper types (map, newspaper, graph, journal) and illustrations. This sets up the color palette and stylization that the reader will encounter through the rest of the book. The pages (thanks to the collage aspect of the illustrations) have a mix of full bleed and border to them. Six illustrations require double-page spreads and (due to the collage nature of the book) several images and words end up in the gutter where the pages are bound.
The illustrations themselves almost exclusively utilize muted colors while their frames (borders) are mix of styles and colors and the background (behind the frame) utilized primarily saturated colors.
Overall, the “illustrations are artistically excellent; relate to the text in a meaningful way; establish mood, setting, characters, and theme; and enhance the emotional impact” (Galda & Cullinan, 2017, p. 69) of the text.
Books Mentioned in The Post:
The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus By Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet
The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat
Blackout by John Rocco
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
References
Galda, L., Liang, L. A., & Cullinan, B. E. (2017). Literature and the child. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
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