Window on everyday life
Replaying the imagination in an atypical way by offering a work a thousand leagues from the conventional, Émilie Chazerand and Anna Wanda Gogusey offer a small album with great possibilities. Between this “Beginning” where “everything begins” and this “End” where “everything stops”, we find in The picture book — published in La ville brule — a hundred words drawn from everyday life, but served in definitions and contexts that extend the scope of the whole. Thus, for example, it is the Promenade, a “walk to relax” and the Manifestation, “a walk to defend oneself” or even the Sun, this “warm smile from the sky” and the Rain, “tears of the clouds”. Each double page responds in this way, multiplying the effect of meaning, transporting the reader to an elsewhere that is as powerful as it is unexpected. And, in a relationship of complementarity, Anna Wanda Gogusey’s illustrations prolong the reflection by offering scenes that depict diversity, where humans and anthropomorphic animals share space in a way that is as natural as it is surreal. Famous.
Marie Fradette
The picture book
★★★★
Émilie Chazerand and Anna Wanda Gogusey, The city is burning, Montreuil, 2023, 96 pages. From 6 years old.
unlikely fight
A butterfly prepares a toast of honey sniffed by an enticed bear. In two stages, three movements, the bear greedily swallows the little sweet nectar. It doesn’t take much for the butterfly, vexed, to face the clumsiness until daybreak. Short poem written by Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952), The bear and the butterfly is an ode to courage and friendship. If the short text makes it possible to subtly grasp the improbable relationship that is played out between the two accomplices, the confrontation takes on the air of a dance thanks to the aerial and colorful illustrations of Marije Tolman. Presented on double pages, the scenes are full of life, populated by many butterflies that flutter around the two characters carried between heaven and earth. Different scenes are played around and under them allowing to grasp at a glance the spirit of the confrontation. The beauty of the album is also very much due to this flamboyance served by the illustrations and the strong contrasts between the colors which recall the depth of Anne Herbauts’ style. To discover.
Marie Fradette
The bear and the butterfly
★★★★
Margaret Wise Brown and Marije Tolman, translated by L.-J. Landais, Albin Michel Youth, 2023, 32 pages. From 3 years old.
Treasures of the river
For his second foray into children’s literature, after an amusing rereading of the story of The princess and the Frog (Violet and Fennel)the author Dominique Fortier offers a story of “marine” apprenticeship which turns out to be just as charming, among other things thanks to its dreamlike accents. A story in a bottle recounts the vacations of Maxime, a city boy who spends his summers on the shores of the St. Lawrence with his grandfather Émile. This former schooner builder introduces his grandson to the riches that litter the banks of the great river, those of its starry sky, the usefulness of lighthouses and the secrets of building miniature ships that are bottled to make them. travel the seas, despite their fragility. The superb illustrations by Steve Adams, which make wonderful use of the maritime theme, add extra soul to the spare and elegant writing of this tale at the height of a dreamy young man.
Amelie Gaudreau
A story in a bottle
★★★1/2
Dominique Fortier and Steve Adams, La Bagnole, Montreal, 2023, 32 pages. From 4 years old.
marine friendship
Two lone wolves, one on all fours, the other on two, struggle to find their place in their respective societies. By the greatest chance, they will get to know each other on the open sea and tame each other. This is the essence of this initiatory and poetic story, imagined by the author Isabelle Wlodarczyk and the illustrator Clémentine Pochon, which offers an interesting reflection on the quest for identity. It is aimed primarily at preschool and primary school children, but it also risks appealing to the oldest who will accompany them in their reading. Its narrative structure, built around magnificent diptychs, highlights what distinguishes the protagonists from their group of affiliation and what will foster their improbable friendship. The simple poetic prose, including all the same a few more difficult words that will give apprentice readers to rummage through the dictionary, adds to this very gentle dramatic rise, which warms the heart, if you let yourself be carried away.
Amelie Gaudreau
The wolf, the old man and the sea
★★★★
Isabelle Wlodarczyk and Clémentine Pochon, D’eux, Sherbrooke, 2023, 36 pages. From 3 years old