The Backyard

A child imagines what has taken place in his backyard, from the present all the way back to the creation of the world.

Grade 1-3-While remaining focused on a set location-a child's backyard-the text walks readers back in time. Large steps into the past are taken quickly, moving from Indians to dinosaurs and finally to a time when volcanos rose from the seas and "the hand of God moved." The text is spare but not seamless. There are awkward transitions between pages even given the repeated refrain, "all in my backyard," which attempts to hold this book together. Visually it is stunning. Reminiscent of the work of Andrew Wyeth, Collier's accomplished and evocative oil paintings are luminescent and movingly real. And yet, there's little child appeal here. The narrative function of the pictures is diminished by two powerful portraits, one of an Indian chief, the other of a lone cowboy lying dead, which are both visually disconnected from the book's setting. Although the concept is of interest, this treatment of the subject works principally as a showcase for fine art. For a more balanced book utilizing a similar idea, turn to George Ella Lyon's Who Came Down that Road (Orchard, 1992).
Martha Topol, Northwestern Michigan College, Traverse City, MI
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With the skill of a consummate artist, Collier ( Petrouchka ) turns the ordinary into the extraordinary in this highly evocative picture book. The spare, poetic text is told from a imaginative child's point of view, and, like Judi Kurjian and David Wagner's In My Own Backyard (Children's Books Forecasts, Oct. 11), story and pictures peel back layers of time to reveal the dramatic history of a garden-variety suburban backyard. What begins as a wide stretch of lawn, complete with shrubs and a clothesline, and a vast expanse of blue sky, is gradually replaced with views of the carpenters who built the home, the farm boys and cows who came before them, cowboys who "sang lonesome songs and died on cold plains," Native Americans, dinosaurs who "walked the shores of seas no sailor ever saw" and further and further back to the creation of the earth. The refrain "all in my backyard" ties the tale together, and readers are left with a final, haunting image of a deserted swing set blowing in a high wind. Collier's illustrations glow with a rich interplay of light and shadow, and his subdued, Wyeth-esque palette adds to the slightly eerie, wondrous quality of the book. Sure to send young readers outside with a renewed respect for their surroundings, this one's a real treasure. Ages 3-8.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An artist who's been much honored by his peers at the Society of Illustrators (15 medals) explores a familiar theme: following a suburban yard from the present back through times when ``cowboys sang lonesome songs and died on cold plains'' and ``Braves loved maidens, and great battles with no names raged'' to dinosaurs, mountains rising and falling, and ``hydrogen and darkness and the hand of God.'' But the concept is secondary to Collier's fascination with the composition at which he excels. A tree and the figure posed against it become a single form; light on a ball echoes a crescent moon; dramatic light and muted colors (to say nothing of one wall of a partly built house, poised alone on a concrete slab) have an intriguingly surreal, dreamlike air. Unfortunately, the striking arrangements of images don't further the narrative or the development of the idea, as do Catalanotto's lovely illustrations for George Ella Lyon's similar, but far more appealing, Who Came Down That Road? (1992). Lyon's lyrical text, too, has a sense of mystery and awe that's lacking here. A handsome series of paintings, but not essential. (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ages 4-8. With exquisite paintings and a spare poetic text, Collier has a boy imagine the history of the place where he lives, starting with the immediate here and now and then going back further and further into the past. The boy thinks of what it must have been like when his house was being built; then he pictures the time when there were "plows and horses / and farm boys and cows"; then lonesome cowboys and proud Indians; then back to the dinosaurs and volcanoes, "hydrogen and darkness," and the beginning of creation. The illustrations evoke the styles of famous American painters, from Remington to Wyeth. Some are romantic, especially those of the Indian "braves" (who might, however, disagree with this white child's view that their great battles had "no names"). The refrain "all in my backyard" brings the past close to home, and the contemporary scenes under sweeping skies at the beginning and end of the book show that change continues. Hazel Rochman