A very special children's book--a story of friendship and rescue, brought to life with simple, arresting drawings--continues to work its magic.
A Story Shared by Generations
On Christmas Eve 1938 in Greenwich, CT, a family friend gave a 9-year-old girl a book about life in the Arctic called Choochee: the Story of an Eskimo Boy. The girl lived in the time of Franklin Roosevelt and Shirley Temple, designer Buckminster Fuller, and the soon-to-open 1939 World's Fair. The book, with its simple but vivid drawings, portrayed life with striking, two- or three-color woodcut-style illustrations. The pictures looked culturally authentic, but there was something modern about them too, which helped to both teach and entertain her.
On Long Island in 1973 a little boy received the same book, slightly frayed now, and began to think about whale hunts and drying sealskins to make kayaks. The images on TV and everywhere around him (Chico and the Man, Watergate) were completely different than the style of this book. Though the modern books and toys were supposedly livelier, and groovier, he actually preferred Choochee to most of what he usually got as presents. Thanks to the quiet variety and style of the illustrations, he also thought not just about Eskimo life but about drawing and how it helps to tell a story. He was inspired to draw eyes and mouths on the abstract faces of the people, seals, and killer whales in the story, trying in a way to climb into the page.
In 2004, the book made its way into the life of a third child, a bit younger than the first, living in Los Angeles. She loved reading Choochee, and another young mind began to pour over the images of sea and ice and the story of friendship and rescue. The simple, arresting drawings began to work their magic again. In fact, she loved the book so much she named her dog after the seal character, Pup-pup.
I was the child in the middle, the no-man's land between Roosevelt and Scooby-Doo. Choochee is now my daughter Kate's book. It's a product of what I consider the golden age of children's book illustration, roughly 1915 to 1940. It tells the story of an Eskimo boy, the life in his villlage, and the relationship he has with a pet seal, Pup-pup. The climax of the story comes when Choochee gets lost at sea and Pup-pup marshals the other seals in the colony to look for him. They alert Choochee's parents with the aid of a floating mitten and effect his rescue, an experience through which Choochee becomes a man and Pup-pup ceases to be merely a pet.
Choochee's Unique Charm
The author and illustrator, Naomi Averill, uses a distinctly abstract block-print style to make the pictures stark, clear, and fun. They also convey a sense of Eskimo and Native American art. It's as if she knows that art is as much a learning tool as is storytelling, and that if you leave it alone and don't dumb it down kids will figure it out. There are few books illustrated in this style today.
The charm of Naomi Averill's work is that even though she knows children are her audience, she's never afraid to do too little. The pictures have lots of space in them and, for the kids and grownups alike, always a little mystery too. The drawings are made the way a child wants to draw: simple and a little unfinished, but richly expressive and full of mood. Think of images in folk art that span two worlds -- naïve in form, yet sophisticated in message.
Choochee features an interesting and original combination of script captions that run like a news crawl, text, and pictures with no words at all. This rhythm gives you time to pause and respond differently from page to page, and it turns Averill's story into a different experience for readers of different ages. To children of 2 or 3, it's a picture book. A year later, the book they respond to is contained in the script captions, and by the time they are 5 the story lies in the words, and the pictures act as a reference. It's a cinematic approach, with close-ups alternating with text, and mood changes accomplished by shifts in the scale of the drawings, making it very hard to tire of. It's almost several books in one. Very clever.
The Timeless Appeal of Good Design
I think one reason this book is still so fascinating to kids today is that reading it transports them into a different world, and they sense the exquisite thrill of not being pandered to. The effect that visual style will have on a child is something you can never quantify. The way shapes are shown (the starkness of the silhouetted elder bull seal), the way relationships are described in a gesture (Pup-pup bringing Choochee's mitten to him after he goes missing) -- they are all artistic images that convey emotion and a way of looking at the world, and of feeling in the world, that can stay in a child's mind forever. It's designed to amuse, but it makes them think later. After more than 30 years, I am still thinking about that book -- writing to you about it, thinking about the 1930s and how things looked different than today, considering how America saw itself when my parents were little. I design furniture whose forms are based in that time, when modernism in its pre-atomic youth had a human element that made it a little charming, a little cuddly, and narrowed the gap between kids' and grownups' worlds, as this book does.
By David
Originally published on CHILD.com
Just last weekend I was showing my sister-in-law my two favorite picture books from my 1940s childhood -- CHOOCHEE and WEE GILLIS (by Munroe Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson). These two books remain priceless.
Posted by: Virginia Howard | March 26, 2008 at 04:33 PM