Picture Book: Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote, Duncan Tonatiuh

Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote (A Migrant's Tale) 
Duncan Tonatiuh
ISBN: 9781419705830

This is a hard one to review.  The surface story is a "brer rabbit vs wily coyote" tale of a young bunny's search for his father who is long overdue from working away from home.  The understory is almost not an understory at all - the parallel between the folktale coyote and the human trafficker coyote is obvious.  Equally obvious is the  mythical "North" on the other side of a great fence and wall where the father works in endless fields to support his family.

Here goes anyway.  I don't think I'll ever use this book directly in programming, because just the subject matter is too politicized for me to handle in what is intended to be a neutral space.  I deeply regret that being the case, but it's too far above my pay grade to rock the boat when there are hundreds of other titles available to suit my needs.  Am I glad it's in the catalog and available to check out?  Yes indeed, and I plan to use it for displays and other appropriate title-suggestion venues.  I just don't ever see myself using it as a storytime book.


Now on to the text and art themselves: On one level, I'm actually happy that the treatment is as obvious and as (I hate to say it) clunky and ham-handed as it is - because I feel less bad rejecting it from an artistic standpoint than I do rejecting it because of the socio-political environment.  If it weren't for the touchy subject matter and obvious intent, I don't think I would have given this art style and storyline a second glance.  It's just clunky and not very well written, and the art doesn't appeal to me.

What do I dislike?  It's just clunky.  It takes forever (5 full spreads) to set up the point - father is away and is expected back, but doesn't arrive.  It's cliched, and not in a good way, and super slow to get to what should be the point: young rabbit's adventures.  When we do get going, they're repetitive, and not in a good way.  The coyote requires food as payment, again and again over the travel (on a train, across a river, through a tunnel), as do the border guards (depicted as snakes with army helmets).  The ending is equally cliched - night falls and the exhausted rabbit and coyote rest in a shack, until coyote decides to eat rabbit for dinner (don't even get me started about the really NSFW implications of trying to explain THAT parallel in social studies class with middle school kids) and Papa appears magically over the horizon, drives the coyote away, and little rabbit reprises his arduous journey immediately (and off-screen) with all the papas from the fields who are ready to return home to their families, where the last spread reveals that (again off-screen) "crows" took all their money and supplies, so they have no way to support themselves still, after all that work.

Otherwise, there's a lot of dialogue, and a lot of text on each page, but it's didactic and obvious, not interesting.  Most of the text is white on darker backgrounds, but there are random pages where it's black, for no good reason, and it's jarring to switch.  The art is stylized, and I don't mind that, but the compositions are usually fairly poor.  When you're using a very stylized and static form, it's necessary to compensate for that by having vibrant compositions with a lot of implied movement, or implied social/emotional resonance.  There were only two pages I really felt accomplished that: the beginning of the story as the families are setting up the party area, and later the half-page of coyote pulling rabbit across the river.

Overall an interesting book.  I'm glad it was made.  I'm glad that we have them in the collection.  I wish that it were a better quality.    

  

The Matchbox Diary, Paul Fleischman, Bagram Ibatoulline

The Matchbox Diary, Paul Fleischman, illus by Bagram Ibatoulline.

ISBN: 9780763646011

Read Oct 2, 2013

A stunningly illustrated book, and a clever conceit.  The frame story has full-colored illustrations of a grandfather and granddaughter in a room full of mementos, collectables, and books.  The girl wants a story, and picks a cigar-box full of tiny little ancient matchboxes.

Now we're into the heart of the story, and the illustrations really shine.  Very like Shaun Tam's The Arrival, these are sepia-toned vignettes based on the "diary entries" found inside of each matchbox.  A dried husk of an olive pit tells of a childhood in rural Italy, marked by hunger and lack of work.  A bejewelled hatpin shines with the hope spurring a harsh trip across the ocean to a land of gold and plenty, while cracked sunflower seeds mark the number of days it took to make the crossing.  Later on, a cracked tooth shows the reality of racist America, a hunk of coal indicates continued aspirations for literacy, and a ticket stub memorializes a first-ever baseball game.

The boxes all opened, the frame returns with color again to finish out the visit to grandfather, and show the girl beginning her own collection, in an emptied box of chocolates.

Truly, absolutely, stunning.  Pair with The Arrival, or Molly's Pilgrim