Children's Review: All the World



All the small moments connect to a larger shared experience, Scanlon's (A Sock Is a Pocket for Your Toes) words and Frazee's pictures seem to say. A conch shell on the book's title page places readers on the beach, and the scenes that follow (as with Frazee's A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever) create the leisurely mood of nature's ebb and flow. "Body, shoulder, arm, hand/ A moat to dig," the book begins, as a boy and girl use pail and shovel, and vignette illustrations track their progress. In a slightly larger picture, opposite, the girl gives her mother "a shell to keep" as her father holds a towel nearby and the boy inspects their impressive sand castle. Then Frazee lets out all the stops, and a page turn reveals a full-bleed full-spread illustration of a rocky peninsula as the family drives away in a red pickup, with another family near a yellow house nestled in a cove, and ocean waves breaking against the shore: "All the world is wide and deep." In the background, on the right of that same illustration, white tents appear, and they become the destination for the next group of characters--beekeepers and farmers ("Hive, bee, wings, hum/ Husk, cob, corn, yum!/ Tomato blossom, fruit so red") who set up the fruits of their labors under the tents ("All the world's a garden bed"). The phrase "All the world is old and new" inspires a full-spread painting of an elderly gentleman playing with a pup and toting a seedling, while children play on an age-old majestic tree whose limbs seem to bend down to form a ladder; one can imagine that the elderly gentleman once climbed that tree. This yin and yang interplay continues, as the kitchen staff in a local cafe earn the same stage time as the patrons, and "All the world is cold and hot" suggests not only a reference to the menu's items, but also the restaurant as a cozy refuge from the rain outside. As the day winds to a close, the community gathers for music making (and "Babies [are] passed from neck to knee"). The children who made the sand castle snuggle with pillows in their PJs. "Hope and peace and love and trust/ All the world is all of us" appears with the closing image of the girl from the opening beach scene. She brings us full circle, her closed hands concealing that single shell that contains within it the sound of an ocean. Masterful.--Jennifer M. Brown

 

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