Jessie Sima Does It Again

A friend of mine recently asked on facebook for children's board books recommendations, and I recommended Three Grumpy Trucks by Todd Tarpley and Guy Parker-Rees, which is a favorite of mine that I haven't seen people discuss elsewhere, so I often recommend or buy it when the opportunity arises. One thing I couldn't recommend in this context, though, was the work of Jessie Sima, which skews a bit older than the asker was looking for.

Last week, I was at Barnes & Noble with our two kids, looking for a book: Son One had been invited to the birthday party of a classmate, and we needed a present. We ended up buying Joseph Kuefler's The Digger and the Duckling, the sequel to The Digger and the Flower (both great books, very charming), but in the back of my mind I had the idea that we'd grab a book for ourselves as well.

What book this would be was foreordained the moment I saw that Jessie Sima had a new book out, and that it was just $10 if you bought it with any other kid's book. I am fairly certain that our first Jessie Sima book was Not Quite Narwhal, gifted to us by our friends Kim and Mike when Son One was due. It's about a unicorn who lives under the ocean with narwhals and feels like he doesn't fit in; eventually, he discovers there's a group of creatures like him on the surface... but maybe he doesn't quite fit in with them either. Double consciousness in children's picture book form!

It quickly became a favorite of mine for reading aloud. Good message about accepting yourself and difference, but also I think Sima has an incredibly strong sense of visual storytelling. I felt quite certain they must have had some background in comics or film or something, because all of their books do interesting things with "camera angles" and pacing, using them to emotional effect. I feel like even well-illustrated picture books often "shoot" everything from the same angle, like a tv show that doesn't have the time to do the interesting camera set-ups you see on film. Sima goes high or low as needed. Not too much, but enough to translate the feelings of their characters in illustrated format. But nope, no comics background... they didn't even go to, say, art school. Entirely self-taught!

Here's another one of my favorite pages from Not Quite Narwhal...

In this interview, they talk about the importance of the page turn, and that's certainly my favorite moment in Not Quite Narwhal. Kelp goes back into the ocean, but feels sad he is away from his new surface friends. Does he have to choose? We get a three-page sequence that explains how he does not:

1. On the first page, there's a lot going on (you would say it has three "panels" if it was a comic), but it ends with the words, "But then he realized that maybe..."
2. Then you go to the next page, which is a big two-page spread. On the left, Kelp is riding on the back of one of his narwhal friends, going toward the beach, which is on the right, with the unicorns waiting. The camera is placed high, looking over Kelp's shoulder down at the beach. The only words here are "just maybe..." The image is mostly empty, filled with the surface of the sea.
   
3. Then there's a final, busy two-page spread of a beach party, joined by unicorn and narwhal alike. The book ends with the words, "he didn't have to choose."

To me, the "just maybe..." page really captures the emotion of anticipation; almost four years later, I still get shivers every time I read it. Just a masterpiece of visual storytelling. It's not flashy, I don't think, but it is supremely effective.

Since then, we've kept an eye out for new Jessie Sima books, and have enjoyed every one of their books we've gotten. Harriet Gets Carried Away is about a girl whose tendency to be distracted accidentally sends her to Antarctica (an incidental detail is that her parents are a mixed-race, same-sex couple). Like Not Quite Narwhal, it has a great anticipatory two-page spread at the end as some penguins carry Harriet back to New York City. Spencer's New Pet is a largely textless book, a humorous story about a boy and his balloon dog. It has a twist that made me jump and laugh on my first read. Love, Z is my favorite other than Not Quite Narwhal, about a young robot who discovers the word "love" and when his family tell him the word "DOES NOT COMPUTE," goes on a quest to discover its meaning. It has a great two-page spread where Z is drifting aimlessly on a boat, despairing that he will ever learn the meaning of the word.

...a page quite cleverly echoed by Perfectly Pegasus.

I see now, looking them up on LibraryThing, that a couple Jessie Sima books have actually passed us by, but in B&N last week, prominently displayed on a shelf was their newest one, Perfectly Pegasus. This is actually a sequel to Not Quite Narwhal, thematically complementary to the original, as well as borrowing its structure; it's about a pegasus named Nimbus who grows up in the sky... all by herself, but her pursuit of a wishing star takes her down to the Earth, where she meets Kelp.

It echoes the original without being derivative, and even Son One realized this. Before I read him the book, he paged through it himself in his carseat on the drive home, and he provided a running commentary, and noted some similarities in structure/technique with Not Quite Narwhal. Plus, he was totally delighted when Kelp made his reappearance. It has a great "just maybe..." moment, a heartwarming message, and a nice sense of humor.

No one ever asks me this, but were they to do so, I would tell them that Jessie Sima is my favorite working picture book author/illustrator. So yeah, they've done it again! (Hold on, gotta go add Hardly Haunted and Jules vs. the Ocean to my kids' Amazon wishlist.)

These books are just a tad too big for the bed of my scanner, so they are cut off and blurry... and it is totally impossible for me to get a scan of any of the two-page spreads I discuss here.