The Lady With the Lamp and the Angel of the Battlefield
‘Florence Nightingale’ and ‘Clara and Davie’
Florence
Nightingale and Clara Barton, two great heroines of 19th-century
nursing, were born a year apart but in utterly different circumstances.
Nightingale was born in the spring of 1820 to a wealthy British family
living in Italy. They returned to England shortly after, entertaining
the beau monde of the day at Embley Park, their estate near
London. Barton, born on Christmas Day in 1821, was the youngest of five
children in a farming family in North Oxford, Mass. Her mother and
sister Dolly seem to have suffered from mental illness; Clara was
raised, in large part, by her brother Davie. She became a teacher at the
age of 15.
In
“Florence Nightingale,” Demi, the author and illustrator of many
biographical picture books (including “Joan of Arc," “Marco Polo” and
“Alexander the Great”), chooses to tell Florence’s story from her birth
to her death at the age of 90. Her narrative works hard to cover so much
ground — following Nightingale from Italy to England to Germany, Egypt,
Turkey and Crimea. Demi’s language is clear, and the story will be
comprehensible to older children, who may find the piety, compassion,
enterprise and perseverance of "the Lady with the Lamp” inspiring. But
the long description of Nightingale’s life feels a little unadorned and
textureless, without a single quotation to give readers a sense of her
voice, which must have been an educated and persuasive one, given the
extent of what she accomplished (much of it by letter).
Fortunately,
Demi’s illustrations bring great charm to each page, and create a sense
of cultural and historical context. She uses a thin black outline for
her human figures (whether wounded or healthy, they all resemble
Victorian china dolls, with pretty, long-lashed eyes and ruddy cheeks)
and then colors the pictures brightly, in some places seeming to use
collage for the patterned textiles of Florence’s dresses and for the
rich interiors of her family’s houses. She draws faces with great skill:
In one scene, the loving look Florence and a young patient — little
more than a toddler — exchange as she carries him in her arms conveys
something important about the rewards she must have found in nursing, as
do the sometimes agonized but mostly adoring expressions of the
soldiers she tends as they lie in long rows in cold, dirty military
hospitals.
In
“Clara and Davie,” Patricia Polacco takes a very different approach,
telling only the story of Barton’s Massachusetts childhood and leaving
her success as founder and longtime leader of the American Red Cross to
an author’s note at the end of the book, where children old enough to be
interested can read further. An artful storyteller, Polacco invents
lifelike details and vernacular dialogue to bring interest to this tale
of the little girl who became “the Angel of the Battlefield.”
When
Davie first holds baby Clara, he exclaims: “That’s some grip. I bet
she’ll be breakin’ horses for Pa before we know it!” Later, as Barton
grows, she is teased because of her lisp, and returns home from school
in tears. (Like Amy March in “Little Women,” Clara is allowed to learn
at home from then on.) She studies medical books and acts as a
veterinarian to the family’s farm animals. When Davie breaks both his
legs falling from the barn’s roof beam, she attends him, proud when a
doctor compliments her, saying, “Well, girly, you did exactly what I
would have done.”
Readers
may prefer Polacco’s narrative to her trademark illustrations. She uses
pencil very heavily and colors her pages with lots of browns and grays,
to dreary effect. Though the illustrations showing Clara and Davie at
play outside are more cheerful, Polacco’s characters’ faces often look
overly dramatic — the happy ones, slightly manic; the sad ones at the
point of total despair. There’s expression in these drawings, to be
sure, but they may leave some children thinking wistfully of Garth
Williams’s pictures for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books,
which somehow convey emotion and setting more attractively — even
without any color at all.
Picture-book
biographies are tricky to get right. Too much information, and the
content will begin to exceed the range of young readers. How can a child
with almost no knowledge of European geography or history make anything
of references to the Battle of Balaclava (now strangely in the news
again)? The facts they will understand are mostly emotional ones: small
acts of kindness or bravery that somehow hint at a character’s potential
to eventually do great things. Polacco is more successful at this, but
Demi’s book offers visual pleasures that children may respond to more
enthusiastically.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
Written and illustrated by Demi
40 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 6 to 10)
CLARA AND DAVIE
Written and illustrated by Patricia Polacco
40 pp. Scholastic Press. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 8)