Reviews

Featured Review, June 14, 2010

The Heart and the Bottle

written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers

Philomel, March 2010

This glorious, expressive picture book is something of an onion, whose fullest appreciation depends upon stripping away layers to get at its heart. On its surface, the story of a little girl who loses a loved one, and secrets her heart away in a bottle, protecting it from pain (and joy), is tender and affecting. Jeffers elevates the romantic nostalgia with an ingenious illustrative style, adding found-image collage to his signature quirky drawings. By filling word- and thought-balloons with clever, collected imagery, the artist replaces straightforward character and relationship development with poignant suggestion, bypassing our synapses and speaking to our spirits. Beneath this resonant exterior lies just the kind of abstracted sentiment that children’s book experts love to dismiss. This sort of book, that tugs at memories and forgives our own regrets, is a book for adults, or, at best, the kind of book adults wished children liked, we think. Indeed, the book’s rosy impression assuages our own prickly cynicism, and so we think of such an adult sensibility as prerequisite for its appreciation. But just because the book speaks to us, particularly, as adults does not mean that it cannot speak to children in a different way. We might admire the sophisticated non-linear narrative, but deem it confusing to children without our refined and practiced sensibilities. But it is non-linear to us only because we approach it with an expectation of clarity and order. Children have no such expectation (until we instill it in them), and given their happiness relating a naturally meandering story, it is easy to imagine their happiness consuming one. The Heart and the Bottle may not possess the predictable pattern that lends itself to pacifying storytime delivery. It may aim well above the logical understandings of its youngest audience. But, in the elegance of its visual expression and purity of its literary soul, it may be the perfect introduction to the sort of conceptual template that kids will call upon, without thinking, over and over, as they grow as readers and as people. - Thom Barthelmess, Curator, Butler Children's Ltierature Center