Making the Most of Time
‘At the Same Moment Around the World’ and ‘It’s About Time’
Time
works so differently for children. While harried adults flutter about
getting ready for this or that, children tend to get lost in their
books, their Lego metropolises, their imaginary games. And when it’s
suddenly time to go to school, or to soccer practice or, heaven forfend,
to bed, they’re astonished. Where did the time go?
Understanding
time is not the same as being aware of its passing, but two new picture
books, “At the Same Moment Around the World,” by Clotilde Perrin, and
“It’s About Time: Untangling Everything You Need to Know About Time,” by
Pascale Estellon, present facts about time in thoughtful and sometimes
poetic ways.
Of
the two, Perrin’s “At the Same Moment Around the World,” originally
published in France in 2011, is the more beautiful. In a book as tall
and narrow as an accountant’s ledger, each page depicts a moment from a
child’s day in a different part of the world. The first is set in the
early morning, as a boy and his father unload fish from a net on an
abalone-pink beach in Senegal. Brightly painted boats line up on the
shore behind them, and Perrin’s intensely colored pencil drawings show a
glimpse of a city in the background, with small houses, electrical
wires, high-rises and palm trees. It’s a mysterious scene, in which the
rosy dawn creeps gradually across the page from the east toward the sea,
where the night stars still shine down.
That
idea of simultaneous difference is Perrin’s theme throughout the book.
In Paris, an urban child under a typically Parisian mansard roof drinks
hot chocolate as he prepares for school. On the adjacent page, a little
boy in a wooded setting in Bulgaria chases after the school bus. As
Perrin’s focus moves gradually around the globe, the hour grows later,
and children in Uzbekistan, China, Japan, Australia, Peru — in total, 24
locations — are shown doing what they might do in their different time
zones. As day turns to night, a girl peeks out the window of a house in
Greenland where the northern lights play across the sky; in Brazil, a
boy sleeps soundly in an outdoor hammock.
At
the back of the book, a pull-out map and serious facts about Sir
Sandford Fleming’s invention of time zones in the 1880s and the
difference between Greenwich Mean Time and Coordinate Universal Time may
make “At the Same Moment Around the World” valuable in schools. But a
casual at-home reader will take from this book less specific but
pertinent information about the differences in landscapes and culture
around the world; the names, perhaps new, of distant places, and perhaps
most important, a sense of awe at the variety of life going on at
exactly the same time.
Estellon’s
“It’s About Time” (also translated from French) is a more
straightforward book that conveys, quite imaginatively, different ways
of thinking about time — and by extension, clocks, calendars, cardinal
and ordinal numbers, seasons and even centuries. That’s a lot to cover.
“You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t touch it, you can’t
smell it, but you can count it,” Estellon begins, and starts her
exploration of time with the shortest increment a child is likely to
understand — a second. Helping children to grasp its duration, she shows
a series of loops drawn in crayon: Drawing the loops takes just about a
second. Later, she provides a recipe for baking a delicious-sounding
pound cake, which takes an hour to make from start to finish. This kind
of broad, visual assistance continues throughout the book, engaging
readers who might otherwise shy away.
Two
central characters, Lily and Jacob, painted in opaque, gouache-like
colors, with big heads and occasionally puzzled expressions, lead
readers through, sometimes enacting the different activities of a
typical day, sometimes dressing up appropriately for the changing
seasons. As representatives of the child reader, they don’t always look
as if they’re having fun. There is, however, a great deal of cleverly,
efficiently presented material in “It’s About Time,” and if there’s one
thing that everyone — from poets like Robert Herrick to more pragmatic
observers — says about time, it’s that we all should make the most of
it. It’s never too early to begin, and either of these books would be a
good place to start.
AT THE SAME MOMENT AROUND THE WORLD
Written and illustrated by Clotilde Perrin
36 pp. Chronicle Books. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 8)
IT’S ABOUT TIME
Untangling Everything You Need to Know About Time
Written and illustrated by Pascale Estellon
48 pp. Owlkids Books. $18.95. (Picture book; ages 5 to 8)