The voice that threads together these moving snapshots of a boy's life, from age two to 11, emanates from an author and artist who has pieced together a memoir that deepens with each rereading. Jim McMullan (I Stink!; I'm Dirty!, both written by his wife, Kate McMullan) places each vignette into a mosaic of a family torn apart by war.
With a father and husband in the military during World War II, young Jimmie and his mother must make up the rules as they go along. But that was also true for Jimmie's grandparents, who arrived in Cheefoo in Northern China in 1888 as missionaries. McMullan makes visual and lyrical connections throughout the book, linking the images in surprising and wonderful ways. Luminous watercolors, so lightly applied that they seem lit from within, capture the milestone moments of McMullan's childhood: fleeing China due to the Japanese occupation, entering boarding school, the airless living room in which Jimmie overhears a conversation between his mother and a lover, and a quiet epiphany when he happens upon an artist painting a canvas in the woods, a "simple process that seemed strangely magical." The landscapes transport readers to foreign lands and convey young Jimmie's sense of the ground shifting beneath him with each transition, dictated by his father's wartime service and his mother's rudderless steering.
Each watercolor and its accompanying meaty text carry readers along on McMullan's journey. We watch an artist in the making, shaped by the strange, wonder-filled and sometimes terrifying experiences he's felt and seen. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness