by Sam Juliano
The last time a picture book featuring a house as its central character connected intimately with the world around it was none other than Virginia Lee Burton’s Caldecott Medal winning The Little House back in 1940. The indomitable country cottage witnessed technological advancements and population increases, transforming idyllic pastures to urban congestion. Burton’s classic posed the modest structure as a symbol, an unchanging seasonal sentry who watched the countryside transform until she was crowded out to the point where time and place became insignificant. The focus in Deborah Freedman’s This House, Once is more elemental, for whatever the inborn kinship with the world around it. For young readers the book teaches the origin of the materials used to build, for adults the metaphysical implications of how tangible materials were at one time part of nature’s scheme. Indeed, one of children’s literature’s deepest thinkers, Freedman, once an architect, will have the most astute wanting to trace everything back to a starting point. Tucked neatly but resolutely through the pages is an acute sense of loss, unavoidable in a world where turnover is inevitable in both tangible and symbolic ways.
Freedman begins her point of origin depicting an unadorned house door, employing splendid metaphorical language to denote size and vertical prominence: This door was once a colossal oak tree about three hugs around and as high as the blue. The door, a wooden panel with a red door knob is evoked in the most sparing of terms, but then is seen in the context of how it evolved as a product from a towering oak reaching up through the clouds. Small animals of course, are oblivious to the phenomenon during the final days of autumn. The stones forming the foundation of the modest home are seen under the door and are described as once existing under the surface, fast asleep, kept comfortable and warm by a bed of leaves. Freedman then magnifies their former residence in an earthy limbo, where they would remain at the mercy of erosion until the intervention of man. A sniffing cat seems to possess a special sense in a leafy patch. Next up, we see a section of bricks around the door that are actually the exterior of the house, and their creation is revealed with bricklaying cognizance:
These bricks were once mud that oozed around the roots, sticky and loose before formed and baked hard.
In an inadvertent pinkish-purple homage to Freedman’s classic Shy, a frog, cat and turtle play in mud, well before it is recruited to the shelter crusade. The shingled roof is bound by cement, which in turn is created by a liberal supply of H20. The author-illustrator features two object vignettes on white, the roof and the L shaped house outline with the latter to gain access to the roof. Again, (from gray wet) frog, cat, turtle and bird wallow in a sludge pond, an excellent source for the glue of construction, though Freedman’s aim it to illustrate how a roof provides protection against dampness and rain and then extreme cold and show in an extraordinary tapestry denoting the low visibility of a blizzard, where only an illuminated window and a bare outline of the thatched roof and chimney are discernible. The cat is quite the trouper in this pervading fluffiness, but is soon enough summoned to safety by the young girl at the first object broached in this architectural equation. Again Freedman’s provocative art transmits the winter phenomenon in sensory terms, with windswept flakes raging around the sturdy domicile.
Windows made of sand, that are melted to glass are connected in metaphorical language to the heat that warms the house: This window was sand once, that melted to glass, in flames like the fire that warms this house and lights doorknob, bookshelf, under-the-stair, and Freedman brings her powerful poetic prose to visual fruition with orange-hued fireplace heat that reaches as far as under the stairs where our young protagonist reads. What were these all, once? The author hauntingly reminds her readers that only the house holds within its walls the acute memory of its creation. Adults may find themselves pondering Hawthorne’s Pyncheon Street house, where faucets have been said to turn themselves on, and the apparition of a boy playing with his toys in the attic could be heard. In such a place a house “remembered” and harbored secrets. Freedman’s house though is far less concerned with ghosts than with how it can to be, and how those who read about it will understand that everything comes from the Earth. The dreamy This house remembers spread is cloud drenched in remembrance, purple and white, one Freedman describes as drowsy with dreams, that drift in through this door in a starry canvas that quickly segues in to the image of the oak tree, the most invaluable natural resource in construction.
Freedman’s themes and visual complexities place her among the most important and accomplished children’s literature artists working today. As she explains in a brief afterward her own New England home is “built on rocky earth, and a base made of brick, with a strong oak door, and a slate roof that shrugs off rain and soaks up sun.” She invites her readers assess their own homes, and the materials that were used to construct it, as well as its location, and the possible significance that may have on how it was built. This House, Once’s underlying message is never to take anything for granted. The home is for most the center of our universe, and the first place where we ponder the miracle of non-life creation. Of course Freedman seems to suggest our homes do have a life of their own, and through her delicate gray and colored watercolor pastels emulate the preciseness of the building process and the once new materials which are the core of it all. Done with care, and executed movingly. This House, Once should be part of next week’s Caldecott deliberations. It is a unique, sublime and thoughtful picture book.
Note: This is the thirty-seventh entry in the 2017 Caldecott Medal Contender series. The annual venture does not purport to predict what the committee will choose, rather it attempts to gauge what the writer feels should be in the running. In most instances the books that are featured in the series have been touted as contenders in various online round-ups, but for the ones that are not, the inclusions are a humble plea to the committee for consideration. It is anticipated the series will include in the neighborhood of around 30 titles; the order which they are being presented in is arbitrary, as every book in this series is a contender. Some of my top favorites of the lot will be done near the end. The awards will be announced in mid-February, hence the reviews will continue until around the end of January or through the first week of February.