Smoky Night

The paintings in this story help relay the message, they are part collage and part painting. There is confusion in the streets and the background reinforces the chaos. It is a cultural portrayal of what it may have been like, or is like when peoples needs are not met and they get angry with the "Man" and fight back. This is a good book for such discussions. It also is good for cultural differences and why people separate themselves from others that they don't feel like their "own" people. ( )

Caldecott Medal, 1995

Now here is a book with gorgeous illustrations. I guess that's one of the things I like: collage-type illustration. This is the story of the LA Riots through the eyes of a young boy who has a cat, Jasmine. When his apartment building starts burning, Jasmine goes missing, along with neighbor Mrs. Kim's cat. Will they be found? ( )

Boy with his cat and mother watch LA riots from their apartment until it is on fire and they must vacate to a shelter without the cat. Firefighter brings cat to shelter with neighbor's cat to neighbor who had not been a friend.
Ages: 4-8
Source: Pierce County Library, UP Branch

Book: Smoky Night
Author: Eve Bunting and illustrated by David Diaz
Characters: Daniel, His Mother, and Ms. Kim.
Setting: Urban City
Theme: Community and connecting with different people
Genre: Children’s picture book
Audience: Preschool to Kindergarten (ages 3 - 6)
Curriculum: Language arts, learning ABC’s
Summary:
Ernst challenges her readers to not only learn the ABC’s but also be interactive by turning the book around and even upside down to view the letters from another perspective. Giving new insight on the image of the letter.
Personal Response:
Book goest directly into the alphabet beginning with the letter A to Z. Each letter is treated like a character, adding personification, by using phrases such as, “turns into”, “dreams”, “pretends” and “masquerades”. The author adds the element of interaction by making the reader turn the book clockwise, and counter-clockwise to continuing reading about each letter. There is also a good use of color contrast between the black background and the bright colors of the letters. ( )

Smoky Night, which is illustrated by David Diaz and writted by Eve Bunting was the1995 Caldecott Medal winner.
The protaginist of the book is Daniel, a small boy who is, at the beginning of the book, observing other people rioting and steeling things. Once their house was set on fire , Daniel and his mother were forced to flee. The story takes place in a street in Los Angeles during the riots and explains just with its pictures the cruelties and anxieties that had marked the town during that time.
In my opinion the book fulfils the conditions of a picture book, as I could read it without using the text. Although, one might mention, that it is difficult to understand the background of the book, the LA riots. To my mind, LA riots is not the main topic of the book. It is about riots in general and how they could harm people and animals, as we can see in the book.
The illustrations oft he book are well thought out and implemented in an appropriate way. The illustrator used collages, which exist of a wide variety of materials. He used children’s cereals, bubble wrap, old soles of a shoe, leather, cartoon, fancy paper etc. – all different kinds of material. On the left hand page, there is always a bright-coloured box that contains the text. This box is also made out of differend kinds of material and the shape is diverging from page to page. The right hand page contains the pictures of the book. Like on the left page, there is also the form of a box used, but it is always surrounded by a black frame. The pictures are acrylic paintigs, which are blocked in by unevenly thick, black lines. These lines are one oft he main determining factors that make the pictures that vivid, expressive and stylized. In my view, the pictures and the background go well together, although on most oft he pages, different colours and patterns are used.

Movement, one of the principles of art can be seen throughout the book. We can see people rioting, Mrs. Kim being shocked of seeing their shop being robbed, the inhabitants oft he house walking down the stairs to become safe, etc. The pictures are not dumb, they move.

Several themes appear in the book. The first one I want to mention is riots. I have already explained that Bungting and Diaz referred with their book to the LA riots, but it could refer to every riot. In the first pages, Daniel’s mum explains her son the reasons for having riots. On the first page, the reader can see Daniel with his mum and his cat standing on the window sighting the situation getting worse. The following pages show the riots going on. It is really interesting to take a look at the faces of the characters oft he book. In picture book, it happen very often that nasty characters are given vicious faces and coloured darker than the good ones. This is not the case in Diaz’s pictures. One may assume that there is a reason for people are rioting which does not necessarily mean that they are bad.

The next topic of the book is race and ethnicity. The skin colour of all the characters are nearly the same: blue, purple, a little bit yellow sometimes. But we can find some differences of the people in the book. Ramirez, for example is a Hispanic name and on the same page the name appear, we can see a man with a moustache. A moustache is one of the stereopypes of a Mexican man. Regarding to the protagonist and his mother, it is difficult to define whether they are Afro-American, White, or of any other kind of races. Without the text and last name, probably I would not have realized that many different races. The intersting thing about the history is that when all the inhabitants of the house have to be in the shelter, because of fire they start talking to each other and welding together. This shows that if people are in the same bad situation, they start to help each other and stick together. To make it short, tragedy bounds.

Smoky Night is a wonderful book and matches the criteria of the Caldecott Award. Throughout the book one can see the movement, the well-elaborated way of merging collages with acrylic painting. I will definitely use that book at school to deal with different topics. ( )