Caldecott honors (2) is impressive given the small number of books he wrote. I am charmed by the plot summary I found on Wikipedia: “The book gives a small slice of everyday life in Maine, where McCloskey and his family moved following World War II. Sal ... finds she has a loose tooth and worries that she won't be able to go sailing with her father. She goes digging for clams and the tooth falls out. Eventually she gets an ice cream.”
There, in four sentences, is what sounds like an easily forgettable story. You have to crack this book open to appreciate why it remains a favorite among Mainers, New Englanders, librarians, or indeed anyone who loves children’s books. Robert McCloskey has the illustrative style of a seasoned commercial artist, the strokes of charcoal are both controlled and fluid. The story appears to be the events of normal day. But what seems ordinary to an adult is often quite memorable to a child. It is those seemingly commonplace events that will stand out as we remember our childhood. The excitement of adults taking an interest in your missing tooth and certain trips involving ice cream shape us and stay with us until the end. On my father’s final stay in the hospital, he recalled with delight the time his father let him have two ice cream cones on their trip to Maine.
Beyond the artistry of telling a timeless story involving hanging out with one’s dad, this book is a trigger for many of my memories of summer trips to Maine. The dad in the book bears a striking resemblance to my father, so this book resonates strongly with me. I, too, have sat with my dad as he tried to start an outboard motor with no luck. The settings in Robert’s 1950s world look very similar to my corner of Maine in the 1970s. The dock at Buck’s Harbor looks almost identical to the one I know, and probably most of the docks along the coast of Maine.
These elements: the sea, the past, and Maine combine to create an undercurrent of reverie in my life. Given how much of my childhood home was littered with paintings and photos of New England, I wasn’t the only one. There is the Welsh word, hiraeth (pronounced: here-eye-th, I think) Like so many of my favorite words, it has no direct English translation. A poor attempt would be to say it is a “deep longing for home” but for many of us, it is a home that we can’t get to because it exists in the past. It is a longing for place that pulses through me even as I stand on the dock overlooking the bay and breathe in the sweet, salt air.
There is no shortage of sea-themed literature, and my favorites are not the most famous. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (book three in The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis) or The Odyssey for Kids, as I call it. This is the children’s version of the journey tale, like Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, or Canterbury Tales.
It is a continuation of the first two books in the series: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobeand Prince Caspian. Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are stuck in the home of relatives with an annoying cousin, Eustace, when they fall into Narnia through a painting of the sea, complete with the ship that will rescue them.
The plot is a series of fantastical adventures. The ship, The Dawn Treader, sets out to find some missing lords and Aslan’s country, i.e heaven. It does contain a lovely passage about death, but don’t let that stop you. Somehow it does not feel like a loss but a continuation of a journey. And as in the previous books, the children find themselves sadly back in our world. It is the adventures on the different islands as well as the descriptions of these places that make this a fun read. “...the other two (Lucy and Edmund) were delighted with the Dawn Treader, and when they...saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and felt the quiver of the ship, and tasted the salt on their lips and thought of unknown lands on the eastern rim of the world, Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak.” Flotsam, by David Wiesner, was published in 2006. I’m saddened that it was too late for my childhood. If I had encountered this book at the age of eight, I would have spent hours immersed the glorious illustrations. This Caldecott winner tells the story only in pictures of a seemingly ordinary object that washes up on a beach at the feet of a curious boy. To say anymore would be