The creative naiveté of the “clay mates” is perfectly captured by Petty’s feisty, spot-on dialogue: “This was your idea…and it was a BAD one.” Eldridge’s endearing sculpted images are photographed against the stark white background of an artist’s work table to great effect. How are they going to “fix selves” on time? Soon a hippopotamus and peacock are staring bug-eyed at a returning pair of astonished hands. But the sound of approaching footsteps panics the pair of Picassos. After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration-expressed as a tangled black scribble-reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices. A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive. Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.Ī blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next. Something of the flipside to the team’s The Other Side (2001), this is a great book for teaching kindness Lewis dazzles with frame-worthy illustrations, masterful use of light guiding readers’ emotional responses. And sometimes second chances are only the stuff of dreams. Ripples, good and bad, have repercussions. She gets a hard lesson in missed opportunities. Suddenly, Chloe is left holding a pebble with the weight of a stone tablet. Finally, one day, a teacher demonstrates the ripple effect of kindness, inspiring Chloe-but Maya disappears from the classroom. The matter-of-fact tone of Chloe’s narration paired against the illustrations' visual isolation of Maya creates its own tension. Those who have weathered the trenches of childhood understand that such decisions are not about reason they are about power. Readers never learn precisely why Chloe won’t return Maya’s smile or play jacks or jump rope with her. Woodson shows through Chloe’s own words how she and her friends completely ignore Maya, with her raggedy shoes and second-hand clothes, rebuffing her every overture. Narrator Chloe is a little grade-school diva who decides with casual hubris that the new girl, Maya, is just not good enough. Woodson and Lewis’ latest collaboration unfolds with harsh beauty and the ominousness of opportunities lost.
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