Home Place by Crescent Dragonwagon and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney is a lovely mystery about a home that isn't there anymore. A girl and her parents go hiking into a woods where they find the remnants of a house and of the life that was once lived in that house. A half-standing chimney, a stone foundation, a blue glass marble, nail, horseshoe, piece of a plate, small yellow bottle, and a china doll's arm. All artifacts of another family from long ago.
The girl begins to imagine that family.
The text is prose-poetry, with the lines on each page written in poem form rather than in paragraphs. This way of writing out the text makes the reader slow down to savor each phrase of each sentence. And the watercolor illustrations capture completely the poetry of the text.
I noticed, also, that when the text refers to the present-day girl in the woods, the illustrations go all the way to the edge of the paper, but when the text is about the family from long ago, the illustrations are set in frames as if we are looking through a window into the past.
Here (below) is a part that I particularly love, just to give you an idea of the poetry in this children's picture book and of how the text is placed upon each page. In imagining the people who lived in this house long ago, the girl sees the mother and father watching a rainstorm in the middle of the night. In a flash of lightning, the mother in a white nightgown almost looks like a ghost.
"And now she is a ghost, and we
can only see her
if we try. We're not sure
if we're making her up, or if
we really can see her, imagining
the home place as it might have been, or was, before
the house burned down, or everyone moved away
and the woods moved in."
I love the quiet mystery of this book, a little girl in the present day in a woods with her own mother and father, conjuring up the past.
This is the back cover. Throughout the book, these greens and browns and yellows and sparks of red capture both the woods that have grown up where the house used to be and dreamy past that was once lived there.
I did notice that one of the reviewers caught an error which I did not see at all, I am so clueless about my flora and fauna. But there is a page in which the text is about "a honeysuckled-vined chimney" and the illustration shows a chimney entwined with morning glories. Ahhhhhh. We have honeysuckles on our back fence and morning glories in our garden, and I should know the difference . . .
I seem to be drawn to children's picture books that are no longer available, but I checked on this one and I am quite sure that it is still in print. I do hope so, it is such a beautiful story. And I love it that the little girl is white and that she imagines a black family in the house. It gives such a wonderful extra dimension to this book, showing with what tenderness people really do reach out to try to understand one another.
And so, I, too, reach out to you, and wish you a lovely, and perhaps mysterious, autumn weekend!
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