A Tisket, A Tasket
The trick with picture books, the Chinese-born illustrator Ed Young has said, is to wed words and pictures so that neither crowds out the other. Few picture-book makers pull off this balancing feat as consistently as Young, who won the 1990 Caldecott Medal for Lon Po Po, a Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood, and has brought many other fables to life with his spare texts and subtle, eloquent pictures. He does it again in I, Doko: The Tale of a Basket (Philomel, $16.99; ages 4-up), originally an oral tale from Nepal.
It's a stunning little story, narrated, as the title alerts us, by a basket. Doko tells how his master, Yeh-Yeh, picked him out "from among many baskets . . . years ago, when he, his wife Nei-Nei, and their baby were all young and strong." Doko is used for carrying all kinds of things: Nei-Nei's baby when she works in the fields, firewood for cooking and then, one sad day, Nei-Nei's body to the grave. The baby grows to become a man. When he marries, Doko carries his wife's dowry to the house. Eventually, they, too, have a baby boy, Wangal. The basket, the little boy and Yeh-Yeh, now crippled and homebound, become inseparable.
One cold day, a log rolls out of the fire, causing an alarm. Yeh-Yeh is blamed, and that night the young couple are heard whispering that "it is time to put him on the temple steps." Doko is appalled, but what can a basket do? Next morning, Wangal's father leaves the house with Yeh-Yeh inside Doko on his back. It is Wangal who saves the day. Politely, he asks his father to remember to bring Doko back. "What for?" grunts the father. "This way," the boy explains, "I won't need to buy another basket when you are old and it is time to leave you on the temple steps."
Doko tells his story gravely and with admirable economy. In fact, there is as much art in what he leaves out as in what he includes. Notice how all the characters are named except the traitor and his wife. Even the basket has a name; humanity, it seems, isn't necessarily a matter of being human. With those generic epithets -- "the boy," "the man," "the woman," "Wangal's father" -- the callous pair is neatly put outside the pale.
Doko's terseness leaves room for the pictures to speak, too. The happy, prosperous time when Nei-Nei tilled the fields with her baby on her back is shown in a rich swath of green and gold. In a year of drought and death, Doko grows "brittle" and the colors sere. A close-up of the hardhearted boy, all staring eyes and set mouth, wordlessly anticipates the terrible day he sets out to abandon his father, the son's face a demonic red mask. On the blank gray double-spread that depicts Wangal confronting his father, a line of light across the horizon suggests the dawning of harmony, the story's last word. Every picture deepens the meaning.
An American Story
Another book in which the pictures both support and enhance the text is Belle Yang's Hannah Is My Name (Candlewick, $16.99; ages 4-8), based on the Taiwan-born author's early years in San Francisco. "Hannah is my name in this new country, " the narrator begins. "it doesn't sound at all like my Chinese name, Na-Li, which means beautiful. . . . It feels strange to become Hannah all of a sudden." As the sharp-eyed little girl recounts her family's ups and downs -- living in "a skinny building like a lime Popsicle," waiting anxiously for green cards -- the mood oscillates. On the one hand, she admits, "it is not easy to become an American if you are not born here." On the other, "We want to become Americans more than anything else in the world."
The words conjure up a time of excruciating tension. Hannah's mother is fired for lacking papers. Another family is deported. Every day, waiting for the mail, the family feels "hope [that] stretches out like a rubber band" before snapping back in disappointment. But the illustrations, inspired by Chinese folk-art paintings, underscore the strain of hopeful idealism. Bright as rainbows, they are alive with humorously observed details: fairy lights strung in palm trees, pot stickers sizzling in a pan, pennies and pencils, moon cakes and shooting stars. Together, words and pictures suggest the complexity of the immigrant experience.
Waiting for Mama
Coming On Home Soon, by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E.B. Lewis (Putnam, $16.99; ages 4-up), summons up another hard time, the World War II years when many women left home to work in place of the men who had gone to fight. It's the story of a little African American girl named Ada Ruth, who must wait through one long, bleak winter with her grandmother and a stray kitten for her mama to return from a wartime job cleaning trains in Chicago. It's a quiet but utterly magnetic book about absence, sadness, waiting, humor and hope -- a tough mood to convey without toppling into bathos. But neither Woodson nor Lewis puts a foot wrong.
Text and art aren't literally wedded here, to use Ed Young's word. Woodson's narrative is laid out like blank verse, mostly on white spaces facing Lewis's lyrical watercolors. But there are correspondences: Grandma's rough briskness ("Good thing it's too cold for fleas," she snips at the cat) lights up the lines about loss and longing much as lamplight or wintry sunlight creep in slantwise to brighten nearly every scene. And when words occasionally spill over into a picture, the effect is electric. In one beautiful double-page painting, Ada Ruth lies on the rug in front of the fire, completely dejected, the world slowed to a standstill by waiting. Or maybe not. Tucked away in the shadow of a chair are two consoling little words: "Time passes."
Newsies
Finally, I like the balance of words and pictures that Don Brown achieves in an altogether feistier book, Kid Blink Beats The World (Roaring Brook, $16.95; ages 5-9). This is the story of how in 1899 the newsboys of New York City went on strike over the press barons' proposal to charge them an extra penny for the papers they sold, including Joseph Pulitzer's World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal -- and won a compromise. (Kid Blink, the newsies' leader, became a hot topic in the press himself, Brown tells us, where he was duly referred to as Mr. Blink.)
Sometimes, Brown figures he needs to spell out a few things and lets words have their head: " 'I'm trying to figure how ten cents on a hundred papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to newsboys, an' I can't see it,' Kid Blink explained. 'If they can't spare it, how can we?' " But sometimes he shrinks the text and lets the story flow instead through his exuberant, sepia-toned watercolors of earnest kids in suspenders and pork-pie hats, strikebreaking thugs and pushcart-crowded streets.
For my vote, he gets the mix just right. •
Elizabeth Ward writes the For Young Readers column for Book World.
