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Summary
Summary
The Jacket is about a book that gets more than it ever dared to hope for or even dream about. The Jacket is a book that needs to be a book. It's a book that pays tribute, in word and form, to all that a book is and can be. Once upon a time there was a girl who had a dog named Egg Cream. This girl loved her dog, but she also loved her special book. And Book loved her. But how about Book and Egg Cream? Could they coexist as the girl's two favorite things in the whole wide world?
After getting an MA in early childhood education from NYU, Kirsten Hall taught both preschool and elementary school for several years while writing learn-to-read books for Scholastic and engaging in the book world in many other ways. Today, Kirsten is the sole proprietor of Catbird Productions, a book packager and boutique literary agency. The Jacket is her debut picture book.
Before Dasha Tolstikova became an illustrator, she was a photographer, a reporter, a newswire translator, a sales clerk, a cargo van driver, a film producer, and a decorative painter--not necessarily in that order. She is a graduate of the SVA MFA illustration program. In addition to The Jacket , she is currently working on her autobiographical graphic novel with Groundwood Books. The Jacket is her debut into the world of picture books.
Author Notes
Before Dasha Tolstikova became an illustrator, she was a photographer, a reporter, a newswire translator, a sales clerk, a cargo van driver, a film producer, and a decorative painter - not necessarily in that order. She is a graduate of the SVA MFA Illustration program. In addition to The Jacket , she is currently working on her autobiographical graphic novel with Groundwood Books. The Jacket is her debut into the world of picture books.
After getting an MA in early childhood education from NYU, Kirsten Hall taught both preschool and elementary school for several years while writing learn-to-read books for Scholastic and engaging in the book world in many other ways. Today, Kirsten is the sole proprietor of Catbird Productions, a book packager and boutique literary agency. The Jacket is her debut picture book.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Literary agent Hall debuts with a lovely story that tenderly showcases the relationship between a girl and a book while giving readers the chance to form a very similar relationship, thanks to a neat bit of book design. Book-a gray-blue rectangle with oval eyes, a small smile, and stick limbs-is thrilled when the right child finds him in the bookstore: "Book thought he must be the girl's favorite thing in the whole wide world." Turns out, though, that the girl also has an enthusiastic scribble of a dog, and a muddy accident leaves Book spattered and stained. Debut talent Tolstikova's mixed-media artwork reveals a knack for emotional range; at Book's lowest, she shows him sprawled on the ground surrounded by desolate grayness, worried that he's ruined. But the girl has a solution-a vivid yellow book jacket with two eyeholes and covered with crayoned drawings. In fact, it looks... exactly like the jacket of the book readers are holding, under which they'll find a familiar-looking gray-blue hardcover with oval eyes and a small smile. Ages 4-8. Illustrator's agent: Sean McCarthy, Sean McCarthy Literary Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Book--blue and personified with a human face--gets a humiliating mud bath courtesy of its owner's dog. Fortunately, the owner has an idea that makes Book happy and also explains The Jacket's title and cover (two eyes looking through cut-out holes set on ostensibly hand-decorated yellow paper). This original, turn-lemons-into-lemonade-themed offering concludes with steps for making a book jacket. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
When a dog named Egg Cream muddies the cover of his young mistress's favorite book, the girl figures out how to make everyone feel better. The text is in the third person, but the story is told from a book's point of viewa whimsical rarity. The bookaptly named Bookhas been waiting, Corduroy-like, for a child to appreciate his fine qualities. ("He was solid and strong. His words were smart and playful.") After the girlknown simply as "the girl"has acquired Book, he and the girl are ecstatic companions until the girl's other lovewhom Book refuses to call anything but Dogmanages to muddy Book. The mixed-media illustrations do a beautiful job of capturing such things as the interior of a bookstore, the girl's love for both her companions and the tragic moment of mud. Fortunately, if unrealistically, the mud has not damaged Book's pages; Book bravely refuses to cry, as "Tears would ruin his ink and paper." After a dark night for Book and the girl, the girl wakes up refreshed and ready to solve the problem of Book's muddy cover. Book's understanding of the girl's love for her dog is a particularly poignant inclusion, both textually and visually. The idea's originality and the child-friendly instructions at the end of Book's tale make this a novel gift pick for the juvenile bibliophile. (book-jacket instructions) (Picture book. 4-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A blue book, with a face and sticklike arms and legs, is the main character in this tale about making the best of a bad situation. Book wishes he stood out from the others at the store, as he desperately wants to be noticed. It's his desire for a child to pick him from all the other volumes and make him feel special. Eventually, a little girl chooses to take him home, and he feels truly cherished until realizing the child's love must be shared with her messy dog. Though wary of the animal, Book is fairly happy until a disastrous visit to the park results in a mud bath. The book feels he'll never be loved again due to his filthy state; however, the youngster has a great idea, and all ends well. Children will be delighted to discover they're holding the actual book and its jacket as they appear in the story. Scratchy, childlike mixed-media illustrations are fitting and clearly reveal the emotions felt by the girl, her dog, and Book. Two pages on How to Make a Book Jacket would be a great storytime activity.--Owen, Maryann Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HAVE YOUR KIDS GONE META? Do they Call their neighborhood jungle gym a "play structure"? Do they mix and match their dress-up garb - a tiara here, firefighter's boots there - with a sense of mischief that might, unnervingly, be termed "ironic"? Have they spotted the clown at the neighbor's birthday party removing his wig and slinking out the side door? They're probably not ready for the labyrinthine tricksterism of David Foster Wallace or Spike Jonze. But on the evidence of a recent spate of highly self-conscious picture books, it would seem that the suspended-disbelief state of early childhood is adapting to the wink-wink, nudge-nudge sensibility of our moment. It's not surprising. There has long been a strain of subversion in picture books - think of Maurice Sendak and Tomi Ungerer, among others - alongside the dominant anodyne snuggliness of the form. Now, sophisticated cheekiness appears to have gone mainstream. These five specimens of reinvention deftly pop the bubbles of their own illusory worlds, drawing attention to the artifices of their norms and aiming to teach children to become not just book lovers but pint-size "consumers of text." The best of these books, luckily, manage to find fresh magic in demystification, and to delight kids while spinning the heads of their grown-up companions. The endpapers of "This Book Just Ate My Dog!" by the British writer and illustrator Richard Byrne, are covered with the repeated apology "I promise not to be a naughty book," written out in a simulation of an errant child's scrawl. In its opening spread we find elfin, round-faced, shabby-chic-dressed Bella prancing across the right-hand page, and leading a friendly cow-like dog, situated on the left-facing page, by a leash. "Bella was taking her dog for a stroll across the page when" (turn the page) "something very odd happened." Half the dog vanishes in the space between the two pages - the crease book designers call "the gutter." Odd things do indeed transpire when one reads books. On the next spread, as Bella yanks the leash, the dog disappears entirely. The two sides of the book are not continuous with each other, and Byrne has transformed the fold between them into a kind of portal, emptying to an imagined nether region. All who try to make the crossing - a concerned friend, emergency vehicles, even perplexed Bella - vanish through the book's exposed scaffolding. To set matters straight, the reader is enlisted to twist the irreverent book sideways and shake its characters out of oblivion, a moment of participatory theater that feels like its own bit of naughty fun. "A Perfectly Messed-Up Story," by Patrick McDonnell, also concerned with boundary-breeching, unfolds on classically metafictional terrain. An amorphously shaped, pajama-clad boy named Louie sets out to be a character in an ordinary picture book, "skipping merrily along" and singing "Tra la la," when his path is interrupted by gobs of food descending from an unseen reader. Louie is indignant. "Who would eat a jelly sandwich while reading my book?" As the abuse continues - dirty fingers, orange juice and crayon markers besmirch the page - Louie addresses his condition with world-weary tones of pathos. "I'm just in a messy old book that will end up in some garage sale," he says, in what might be considered a "Toy Story" moment, if not a Brechtian one. The pleasures of watching a book depart from its conventions and address its sticky-fingered reader will tickle even the littlest postmodernist. The peanut butter stains don't hurt. Kelly Bingham and the illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky are on a mission to raise awareness of genre to a level of madcap chicanery. Their first book together, "Z Is for Moose," imagined a collision between a poker-faced alphabet book and a goofy animal romp. This one, "Circle, Square, Moose," purports to be a benign primer in geometry - a "shapes" book - opening with a spot-on parody of a pablum-textured instructional voice. Before long, though, the rambunctious moose trespasses onto the text and tramples its decorum. The comedy is rather broad, but reaches a pitch of surreal delirium as a zebra and a crazed cat join the fray. Adults who have slogged like prisoners through the pieties of self-serious picture books will find the anarchy refreshing; kids will recognize the mash-up world they were born into. B.J. Novak's "The Book With No Pictures" is the most conceptually radical of these books, doing away altogether with the medium's defining element: There's not an illustration to be found here. Novak, a writer and actor best known for his role on "The Office," spoofs the reverent silence of visually lush, text-free books like Tao Nyeu's "Wonder Bear" and Jerry Pinkney's "The Lion and the Mouse," making the refreshing and contrarian case that words alone have sensory and imaginative vibrancy to spare. "It might seem like no fun to have someone read you a book with no pictures," admits a page of black type set against a blinding white background. What's fun, though, is to be let in on trade secrets. "Here is how books work," the confiding typeface continues. "Everything the words say, the person reading the book has to say." An aging semiotician might approve this recognition of the reader's complicity with a book's invisible agenda. For his part, Novak exploits the seeing-through device with abandon. The (presumably adult) reader is made to sing, issue nonsense sounds, extol the superiority of the child who is being read to, and say things like "I am a monkey who taught myself to read" (the favorite moment in my home). It's a raucous and illuminating gag, a formalist free-for-all, even if it wears a bit thin on repeated readings. The main character of "The Jacket," the first picture book by Kirsten Hall and the illustrator Dasha Tolstikova, is named Book. Book is a teal rectangle with soft, wide-apart eyes and a pencil stroke of a smile, uncannily resembling the cover of "The Jacket" itself when the jacket has been removed. This book is a revelation, seamlessly blending the cleverness of its conceit with the virtues of captivating storytelling. Book is lonely until he is discovered by a reader, "the girl," in whose hands he finds his place. Such bliss can't last, though. For "the truth was that there was someone else whom the girl really loved, too" - her dog, Egg Cream, represented as a shaggy blur. Book is nearly put out of commission by his rival, until the girl repairs him through a creative act that completes both Book's jacket and "The Jacket" (the book). It's as poignant as it is smart. The beauty of Tolstikova's pastel-tinged illustrations, whose manner changes from page to page and suggests both childlike simplicity and a quiet mastery of modernist color and design, shows there's more to a book than its concept. MARK LEVINE, a poet, teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
