Tender and dreamlike, Ren's Pencil by Bo Lu (Bao's Doll) depicts imagination and a "magic" pencil helping ease one girl's transition from her life in "the East" to an unfamiliar new home in "the West."
Ren loves "magical stories... where a brush [makes] pictures come alive." She, Popo, and Popo's yellow-orange cat imagine themselves together in books about "princesses trapped under pagodas, rescued by fairies," and other magical tales "from the East." Then Ren's parents tell her they're "moving to the West." Ren wants to stay with Popo but Popo hands Ren a pencil and assures her she will make her own magic in the West. There, everything is different. Faces and hair are "unusual colors," she's told that in school she'll be called Lauren, and she cannot "imagine herself in these stories." When a flash of yellow-orange streaks by, Ren chases a giant cat, who invites her to "hop on." She enters a dreamscape where a yellow orange-haired princess in a tower needs saving and, when no fairies appear, Ren sees the "soft glow" of the pencil Popo gave her. Ren saves the princess, with whom she begins to share her drawings.
Bo Lu's expressive language feels intensely personal as she relates how Ren uses her pencil to communicate and create her own "something new." Lu's pencil, watercolor, and digital illustrations are soft with dark blues and purples to indicate the world of stories; she switches styles to include naïve art for the drawings done by Ren herself. Art and storytelling provide a familiar place wherein Ren can learn to paint her new and old homes together into stories where she belongs. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author