THE SKETCHBOOK

A little girl who loves to draw is shy about showing her
pictures to anyone.

Young Lily is “afraid of what others might think of her
drawings, so she [keeps] her pictures hidden in her sketchbook.” While
author/illustrator Seal’s illustrations are varied in their presentation—double-page
spreads are interspersed with spot illustrations, vignettes, and full-page
bleeds—the overall presentation doesn’t sparkle as a book about art should. The
characters’ expressions are uniformly pleasant, and the illustrations mostly
mirror the text. A few notable illustrations reach beyond, however, as when
Lily’s imagination is visually underscored by her drawing of a rainy day and a
poignant moment when she draws herself in a group of children. The storyline
inevitably engineers that Lily’s drawings are accidently seen by the
townspeople—a gust of wind scatters them—and Lily is mortified until she
realizes that people are praising them. Strangely, here the storyline moves
from confidence in drawing to confidence in telling stories as, “for the first
time in Lily’s life, words came spilling out of her.” The final illustration
and its accompanying text add to this perplexity by showing Lily surrounded by
new friends admiring her pictures, with the words: “And now she’d found a
voice, and friends to share them with.” This conflation of storylines, strange
grammar aside, is just plain confusing. Lily presents white while other
residents of her picturesque town are somewhat diverse.

Competent illustrations, muddied storyline. (Picture
book. 4-6)