The Red Book

* Lehman, Barbara. The Red Book. New York: Houghton Mifflin Books, 2004.

In this wordless picture book, a girl in the city finds a red book and opens it to find a map of a faraway island which magnifies in scale, frame by frame, to reveal a boy walking on the beach. He finds his own red book which in turn opens to a detailed city image which magnifies until he sees through a window to a girl a reading a red book with a picture of a boy on an island looking back out at her. The story takes the age-old device of the magic book (or object) which pulls the character-reader into a magical reality but, since this is a wordless story, the text is replaced by maps with their own particular visual language. It is hard not to be transported by this gentle and whimsical story about friendship, happenchance, magic, and the wonder of maps.

I was in love with this book from the moment I laid eyes on its invitingly, indulgently, perfectly red cover. In fact, having chosen the book by cover alone, I parked at the beach on my way home from the library because I couldn't wait to read it. And the story inside didn't disappoint: the beautiful, bold and deceptively simply illustrations in watercolour, gouache and ink create a complex and nuanced narrative. Each time I re-read it, there were new layers to discover. This story has that elusive quality of wonder that makes me see the world differently; when I closed the book and walked along the beach, I really did expect a strange new friend to appear in the sky suspended from a large bunch of balloons. I loved that simply by carrying the red-coloured book, I became an echo of the story inside it and the world around me seemed that much more magical for it.

The Red Book has enough story to convey a clear narrative, but enough mystery to create intrigue and scaffold imaginative discussion. This is a perfect book for one-on-one dialogic reading. It is impossible not to compare this book to Davide Wiesner's Flotsam, another consummate wordless picture book featuring a camera which washes up on a beach and creates a connection between children across great distances and through time.

Wordless picture books are a fantastic genre that seems to be gaining popularity. They have a wonderful versatility - they can be told in any language, they can be used by parents with low-literacy, they can allow children to take on the role of telling the story to an adult (or each other) before they can read, and they provide a great vehicle for children to practice their own narrative and linguistic skills. They also situate the language pre-literate children use to read picture books - the language of images - in a primary role, empowering children to be direct readers with or without adult participation.

It took several readings for me even notice that the book's title was a visual one: No where on the cover (except the spine) does the text "The Red Book" appear, but with an entirely red cover broken only by the small image in the corner of a girl running with a red book in her arm, the book is unmistakably identified as The Red Book.

A Caldecott Honor Book, and no surprise.