In many ways, the book is a children’s book version of the letter she wrote to her son.
Dreamers
By Yuyi Morales
Neal Porter Books (an imprint of Holiday House)
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4055-9
Ages 5 and up
Work in the children’s book business long enough and you run the risk of harboring grudges. Or, to be more specific, grudges o’ love. Grudges on behalf of the hardworking authors and illustrators that never seem to get their adequate due.
There are whole lists of talented people out there that somehow don’t appeal to award committees, year after year, in spite of their supreme talents. That’s why it makes me so happy when things begin to change.
Yuyi Morales may be a name new to you, but I’d been following her career closely over the years. Her remarkable model work on her Caldecott Honor winning book Viva Frida was preceded five years earlier by the unjustly ignored model work she did on Tony Johnston’s My Abuelita. And for all that the Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor given to Thunder Boy Jr. celebrated her unique ability to enclose and encircle and gather together, where was the wide acclaim for her earlier Mexican wrestler delight Nino Wrestles the World?
So you can imagine my happiness when I saw Dreamers for the first time. Not since Jerry Pinkney’s Lion and the Mouse have I had such a palpable sense of a long-term artist finally getting their due. Now, at long last, the world will know better the name “Yuyi Morales”. And keep knowing it too, if I don’t miss my guess.
On the title page, a girl sleeps on a desk, a pencil fallen from her hand and drawings scribbled beneath her. Turn the page and now that same hand is holding a pencil, but it is adult now. It has written “Amor – Love – Amor.” above the image of a mother and child falling towards one another. The text reads, “I dreamed of you, then you appeared.”
The child is tiny and the two travel across a bridge to a place full of fog and bats and words that cannot be understood. Unable to connect, the two learn, make mistakes, and just walk endlessly until they reach “a place we had never seen before.”
The books there are for the taking and it is “Where we didn’t need to speak, we only needed to trust.” And with trust comes knowledge. And with knowledge comes creativity and art and the ability to find your own voice. And the hand that at the start wrote “Amor – Love – Amor” writes “Love Amor Love” at the end.
A personal note from the author and an extensive Bibliography of “Books That Inspired Me (and Still Do)” bring everything to a close.
By: Nancy Churnin, Theater Critic
