CCBC-Net Archives

[CCBC-Net] travelling books

From: Miriam Lang Budin <miriammeister>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:43:00 -0400

I'm a big fan of Lynne Rae Perkins' PICTURES FROM OUR VACATION, a picture book that was published last year. It's so evocative of those trips to the old family farm house where tennis rackets have warped to the shape of potato chips, the television gets three channels ("the striped channel, the channel that showed what you could watch if you had a better TV and the French channel") and Dad's "secret path" to the lake proves to have become secret even from him. Perkins' watercolor illustrations make ample use of the cameras the narrator and her brother receive just before setting out--a photograph showing that "There was not anything to look out at" as they are driving, the cracked and drained pool at the motel where they stop one night. And her full-page artwork adds telling details--maps of their route to the farm and their trip to the lake, the children constructing houses of cards on top of their father as he naps through a rainy day. At the end of their vacation, the extended family gathers for a memorial service for Great-aunt Charlotte and during the days they're together everyone is too busy to take pictures. "...it's hard to take a picture of a story someone tells, or what it feels like when you're rolling down a hill or falling asleep in a house full of cousins and uncles and aunts...But those kinds of pictures I can keep in my mind."

-- 
Miriam Lang Budin
Chappaqua Library, NY
Received on Wed 11 Jul 2007 03:43:00 PM CDT