Pebble Island by Jon McNaught
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book is lovely, even if there isn’t much to it: it is only about thirty pages, and the size of a cd. kids, ask your parents.
the colors are muted and the artwork deceptively simple at first glance, but it manages to transmit an emotional wallop just with its lovely, bleak landscapes and its quiet lonesome moodiness. initially, i was drawn to it because i thought it looked seth-y. and it has that sadness in its lines and shadings that you see in seth, but it’s a different sadness. it’s less of an intellectual sadness; it’s emotional, quiet and stricken.
there are maybe five colors in the whole thing, and no dialogue. the only text is in the second “story,” which is two pages of landmarks:
and in the third story, there is some dialogue from indiana jones on the tv the man is watching.
and that’s it.
and yet, it is haunting. for me, the best story is the first one, Peat Bog. a young boy packs a backpack with some snacks and a toy dinosaur, rides his bike across a desolate landscape, passing some houses and a single sheep, and rides to the middle of a field where there is a broken-down truck, a dead bird, and some litter.
the snacks are for some fish living in a tire filled with water and some ants in an anthill. after he finishes feeding his pets, he summons his friends by hot-wiring the truck and turning on the headlights. they arrive on their bikes, and blow up the dinosaur with a firecracker. it starts to rain, they go home. and that’s it. it doesn’t take much time to tell that story, but the artwork is just as effective as text. it’s the kind of thing you know i dig—the finding beauty and vitality in this completely barren landscape, the triumph of the power of imagination, the sustaining life in places there should be no life and all that. just very lovely, all around. left me with the nostalgia-sorrows for a life i never lived.
BOOM!
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