This post is comprised of books that made a deep, lasting impression on me. Obviously, they're not the only books I remember from my childhood, but these were some of the first to come to mind when I thought about doing this post. They're the kind of books that, when I see them in someone else's home or in a bookshop, the illustrations call to me from a long-lost cavern in the subconscious of my youth.
The Story about Ping is a book with a deceptively simple plot. Ping, a little yellow duck with a passel of relatives, lives on a boat on the Yangtze River. One day, fearing that he will be punished for tardiness if he returns to the boat, he instead hides from his human master. Thus, Ping is lost and begins a solitary adventure on the river.
The illustrations are what stuck with me the most over the years - especially the drawing of the little Chinese boy who meets Ping. He has little pigtails, and is tied to a wooden barrel, which is in turn tied to his family's boat. The pictures were so
exotic to me as a young girl. "So this is what China looks like," I thought. "And this is how Chinese kids live. Amazing."
The overarching theme of the book, that of the value of home and belonging, is also memorable. Ping finally does return home to his boat "with the wise eyes," even though it means being punished for dawdling. He realizes that having a place to call home is worth the restrictions and compromises of community living. And Ping and his mother and father and aunts and uncles and forty-two cousins live, presumably, happily ever after.
There are several versions of
Stone Soup, and the one with the illustrations I remember is the Caldecott-winning retelling by Marcia Brown. What fascinated me about this book was not just the soldiers' ingenuity in getting the stingy villagers to contribute their food to the soup, but the pictures of the food itself. There are aprons bursting with carrots, bushels of cabbages, potatoes and onions and more. To this day, I find almost nothing more beautiful than piles and piles of fresh produce.
The Poky Little Puppy is an interesting story accompanied by uniquely styled illustrations. I ordered the board book version for my two-year-old son and I enjoyed seeing all the drawings again, amazed at how much felt familiar to me after almost two decades of not laying eyes on them. Maybe this book was so mesmerizing to me as a kid because the pictures are of things at ground level - in other words, things a child would normally notice: a wild strawberry, a caterpillar, a lizard. It's a fun book, and strangely, like
The Story about Ping, is also about a slowpoke (hence the name).
