As with so many of Laura Vaccaro Seeger's books (The Hidden Alphabet; First the Egg), with her latest addition, she blows open the possibilities of the picture book to expand both its conceptual and physical definition. The simplicity on the surface of this ode to the color green masks the planning and seamless execution of a series of intricately connected images.
Seeger's homage starts as a study of green's many hues. She begins with a white rabbit in a thick grove of trees--"forest green"--and closes with a girl and her father admiring a majestic tree near a barn--"forever green." Two leaves sprout from the tree on the right-hand edge of that first spread of the forest; two leaves sprout from the tree in that last picture with the barn. Even the youngest of Seeger's fans have learned to search for the holes in the pages of her books, and in the forest spread, those two leaf shapes are die-cut holes filled in by a deep green patch on the following full-spread illustration, where a turtle swims in a pool of "sea green." For the ocean depths, those leaf-shaped holes now outline a pair of fish, with details showing through from the forest painting to fill out their markings and eyes. The author-artist later hides the letters for "jungle" (in "jungle green") and, for the following spread, "khaki," in what appear to be random blades of grass and background paint spatters. She demands readers' close observation, and suggests that each piece of art tells a story unto itself, but also that these interdependent images contribute to a larger narrative about nature, and all the places we see green in our experience of the world.
She moves from woods to sea to jungle, but her artwork also places children on their backs, looking up through a lacework of fern leaves and gazing up at the moon, a trio of moths and a fern-colored butterfly. She stretches the concept to the abstract, the "slow green" of a caterpillar and the "glow green" of fireflies. She raises themes for conversation: the "never green" of a stop sign, contrasted with a "no green" winter landscape. Every child who's been through the cycle of the seasons knows that this snowy scene will be green before long. That spread has the standout die-cut: the full moon itself is the round hole, looking like an extension of the snowman pictured, and on the next page that circle becomes a sun that shines on a boy planting a seedling.
Could that boy planting the seedling have grown up to be the father with his daughter admiring the full grown tree on the final page? Laura Vaccaro Seeger gives us a meditation on nature's gift for keeping us in the moment and its constancy through the ages. --Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Talker: Laura Vaccaro Seeger's ode to green breaks the bounds of picture book–making as her series of images form a whole that mirrors the cycle of life.