Is Was

Is Was is a sort of picture book documentary of a day's worth of occurrences in the natural world. The events are so commonplace--rain falls, a bird flies, a bee buzzes--that in true life they would be easy to ignore. Deborah Freedman's spare, sibilant text and radiant watercolor-and-pencil art ensure that her readers will be very much absorbed by nature's everyday doings.

The book opens with a scrim of whitish-gray clouds through which a triangle of blue sky is barely visible: "This sky is the same sky that was blue, but now is/ spilling down." The spill is captured in an illustration that shows the clouds releasing rain, which, one page later, becomes puddles: "This rain is is is/ was was was/ the same rain that was drips...." Is Was proceeds to introduce ordinary but dazzling natural incidents, up until the final illustration, which presents a purple sky, below which an adult and a child--perhaps the book's narrator all along?--studies the moon: "Still, this sky is/ the same sky/ that was."

Is Was reads like a poem, the odd "is" or "was" appearing to be forged by hand and literally written on the wind. It's a graphic liberty that Freedman (Carl and the Meaning of Life) puts to splendid use in order to reinforce the book's message: change is inevitable, but those who are paying attention will note that transformations always bring traces of the past ("was") into the present ("is"). --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author