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Good books, old friends

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By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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But I am much more excited about his contributions to The Journey (Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2001, $16), his latest collaboration with his wife, Sarah Stewart.

An irreverent and quirky assortment of trivia about all but the current White House inhabitant, So You Want to Be President? deserves credit for making fun a subject children normally find dull.

However, The Journey, a poignant account of an Amish girl named Hannah's first visit to a big city, is a much more complete and emotionally satisfying offering.

St. George and Small's partnership succeeds in showing just how human our presidents are, gleefully preferring to expose their faults and foibles than to celebrate their achievements.

But St. George's patronizing prose is not worthy of Small's witty illustrations. With sentences such as "One of the bad things about being President is that the President always has to be dressed up," St. George writes specifically for an audience of small children.

Using his usual media, "ink, watercolor and pastel chalk," Small, on the other hand, produces uproarious renderings of our former commanders-in-chief which will appeal to children of all ages.

I cannot decide which I like best: Richard Nixon jumping for joy in the White House bowling alley, fingers on both hands giving characteristic victory signs; William Howard Taft being lowered into his gigantic bath tub by a crane; or George Washington being tugged at from all angles by all those irritating first siblings.

Granted, readers will take away from St. George's text dozens of useful little tidbits that they did not already know. Bill Clinton's Labrador retriever Buddy might take umbrage at the description of his master as a cat person, but I am sure her other assertions are accurate.

Still, only Small's amusing and informative political cartoons qualify this book as award-winning material.

That is not the case with The Journey. Stewart's narrative and Small's illustrations are a perfect fit for each other in this insightful and dramatic contrast of Amish and mainstream American society.

Great care and thoughtfulness have gone into the presentation of Hannah's week-long first visit to Chicago. Every word and every picture, quite literally from cover to cover, has meaning.

The story begins on the book cover and several subsequent wordless pages. Pictures alone depict the various stages of Hannah's journey first by horse-drawn coach and then by bus from small village to big city — from peace and quiet to busy and noisy.

Not until Hannah and her traveling companions (her mother and her mother's friend Maggie) are safely installed in their hotel, and have begun their sightseeing, does the narrative begin with Hannah's first of seven diary entries — one for each day of her vacation from "the farm and chores!"

The narrative ends with Hannah's record of her final day in Chicago. The story ends with the back cover illustration showing her arrival home.

Stewart dexterously words Hannah's thoughts to give us both her impressions of Chicago and her observations of how her own small rural village, without modern conveniences of any kind, radically differs from it. In equal parts, we are introduced to what Hannah considers strange and new, "the tallest buildings in the world," and what she considers dear and familiar, "Aunt Clara's porch."

Each time she picks up her pen to confide her experiences, she reveals not only something she has learned about the world, but something she has learned about herself. She journeys both physically and metaphysically into uncharted territories, opening her eyes to a different way of life, but remaining true to her own values and traditions.

Chicago fills Hannah with awe and wonder: "Going down the street is like making a journey across the whole world."

But there is just no place like home: "I hope Aunt Clara won't think I'm being a big baby when I tell her how much I've missed her and my pony and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa and my sisters and brothers. I didn't think I'd ever miss my brothers!"

As substantive as the narrative is, providing a fully realized characterization of its heroine with a relatively few well-chosen words, it is presented only as an accompaniment to Small's deft visual interpretations of what that heroine sees and feels. As should be the case in every picture book, children who cannot read can follow what is going on through Small's evocative illustrations.

Like Stewart does in her text, he also stretches the significance of the book title, taking the reader on separate journeys to both Chicago and Hannah's Amish village by sandwiching the diary entries between illustrations of each. As an added bonus, we also get small pen and ink sketches of Hannah in the act of writing in her diary beneath the rectangular boxes in which every entry has been cleverly offset to look like real pages from that diary.

There even appears to be importance in the size allotted to each illustration. The Chicago scenes cover only two-thirds of a pair of facing pages, allowing ample space for Hannah's journal on the remaining third. No words are allowed to crowd the two full facing pages devoted to scenes of Hannah's home life.

Small's pictures for The Journey are just as dazzling as they are in for So You Want to be a President? (I love the soft shades of blue he uses in the latter to add an air of mystery to night time travel to and from the city!) They are also more fulfilling in terms of the range of emotions they elicit.

Readers will delight in the obvious differences he points up between two oddly opposed worlds and be sombered by the subtle similarities that he sees as an albeit fragile connection between those worlds. Hannah views one of Monet's haystacks paintings at the Chicago Institute of Arts on one page. We view the look-alike haystacks that dot the landscape surrounding her village on the next page.

Small's eye is sharp and reflective in both these picture books. Stewart, with her gift for evoking the voice of a little girl without writing in language that only little girls will want to read, does Small justice. St. George stirs interest but does not inspire.

You may enjoy So You Want to be a President? But you will love The Journey.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She is the children's librarian at the Genesee District Library's McFarlen Branch.

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