From: Maia <maia>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 13:43:59 -0700

Monica wrote:

(Zwenger's disappointed me too. In an interview published in The Knight Letter, she spoke of finding the book haunting, but it just is not my view of it at all so her illustrations don't work for me, beautiful as they are.)

I just came across Zwerger's version today. (Thanks to whomever left it prominently displayed at the Eugene public library! ) It is a very odd rendition, I think - altering between two and three dimensions. Some of the images were lovely, others, I thought, flat. I particularly liked the tea party scene on 55, the cards painting roses on 62 (here she does an excellent job of blending a sense of two and three dimensions, as is appropriate for this scene), the various sea creatures in chapter 10, and Alice above the jury box in chapter 11 (page 89). However, from a book design standpoint, I thought it really didn't work - the pictures didn't seem to be a part of the story, but more like doodles on the side of the page. And the flatness of some of her paintings further distanced them from the tale. Not a child's version, I think. ?

Monica, in your classroom unit do you spend much time talking about how illustrations seep into and visually "art-iculate" (and therefore define) the story in the mind of the reader? Certainly for older students, it seems that Alice would be an excellent tool for analyzing the impact of image on the reader's mental eye
(if you will)... and useful for discussing the Caldecott Awards, for example.
(E.g. how a book is separable into inseparable in its component parts of text story, image story, and design story... and whether a work that has these multiple aspects can truly be perceived from the lens of one component only.) ?

Maia
-maia at littlefolktales.org www.littlefolktales.org the Spirited Review: www.littlefolktales.org/reviews
Received on Tue 24 Oct 2000 03:43:59 PM CDT