A Sense of Place
‘This Is Our House’ and ‘Once Upon a Northern Night’
From "This Is Our House"
By SARAH HARRISON SMITH
Published: July 31, 2013
“What would it be like to stay in one place — to have your own bed, to
ride your own bicycle?” a little girl named Anna wonders in Maxine
Trottier’s 2011 picture book, “Migrant.” “Now that would be something.”
Anna’s parents, who are migrant workers, move from one temporary home to
another, and Anna imagines herself as a rabbit, living in abandoned
burrows, or a bee, flitting from flower to flower. She is effectively
homeless, and longs to live a settled life, “like a tree with roots sunk
deeply into the earth.”
THIS IS OUR HOUSE
Written and illustrated by Hyewon Yum
40 pp. Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)
ONCE UPON A NORTHERN NIGHT
By Jean E. Pendziwol
Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault
32 pp. Groundwood Books. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 7)
Related
Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews
From "Once Upon a Northern Night"
Home is also at the heart of two new picture books, “This Is Our House,”
written and illustrated by Hyewon Yum, and “Once Upon a Northern
Night,” written by Jean E. Pendziwol and illustrated by Isabelle
Arsenault (whose artwork for Trottier’s “Migrant” earned a New York
Times Best Illustrated award). Yum, originally from South Korea but now
living in Brooklyn, sets her story in a city that could very well be New
York, among a family of recent immigrants whose country of origin is
never specified; Pendziwol and Arsenault, both Canadian, describe a cozy
home in a wintry rural landscape.
On the title page of “This Is Our House,” a watercolor illustration
shows a photograph of a little girl peeking her head around a front
door, as if to welcome the reader inside. On the next, a framed black
and white photograph — again painted in watercolor — shows the house as
it looked when her grandparents “arrived from far away with just two
suitcases in hand.” In a pattern Yum continues throughout the book, the
photo of the house is faced by a full-page scene. Here, the girl’s
grandparents talk to each other as they stand outside their new home for
the first time. The grandmother looks as if she is either shyly
pleased, or hesitant. What is certain is her husband’s encouraging
smile.
The photos reveal the public story, Yum seems to suggest, but there’s
more to be told. And sure enough, the full-page scenes are intimate
rather than posed: moments of action, and sometimes of crossness and
tears; a little quarrel over the painting of the baby’s room on one side
of the spread, a photo of the delighted expectant mother posing in a
fully decorated room on the other. Mostly, the three generations who
come to live in the house together display smiles and kind concern for
one another.
Yum uses a springlike palette of yellow, pinks and greens, even when
there’s snow on the sidewalk, and the little girl’s dark braids
perfectly set off the fresh, happy colors. With time, the once-bare
facade of the house comes to life with window boxes, flowering hedges
and potted plants of the front stoop. The seasons cycle though the
pictures as the family grows, including, at the end, a baby brother for
the little narrator. She gives a slight twist to the book’s title in her
final summary: “This is our home where my family lives.”
If family is central to Yum’s sense of home, Pendziwol and Arsenault
enlarge that sense of a precious place to encompass a natural setting.
“Once Upon a Northern Night” is spoken in a voice that could be that of
an artist, a parent or even a deity. While a fair-haired boy sleeps
“wrapped in a downy blanket,” the voice describes a scene in which wild
animals roam across snowy fields as the northern lights play across the
sky. Of the lights, the narrator says, “I tried to capture them but they
were much too nimble, and only their rhythm reached you, deep in
slumber, rising and falling with each sweet peaceful breath.”
Arsenault’s nighttime landscapes, created with gouache, ink, pencil and
watercolor, add dramatic emphasis to the text; the wings of an owl with
bright yellow and black eyes can scarcely fit on two pages; the russet
tail and hind legs of a fox are lit by the moon while the rest of his
body can be seen only faintly, in the shadows. Black and white dominate
with occasional flashes of color — red apples on the bare branches of a
tree, spiky green pine needles. The boy’s house appears only twice, but
the overwhelming sense of the home is as a secure haven from which to
view, or imagine, a mysterious and beautiful world. Older children may
resist the slight sentimentality of Pendziwol’s text, but on a dark
night a younger child is likely to revel in this book’s mixture of
magic, wildlife and deep comfort.