There Is a Tribe of Kids by Lane Smith
This is one of those books that has so much in it, that after my first read I had to sit it back on the shelf and revisit it later. The illustrations are so rich while the text is so sparse, making it hard to parse one without the other. I attempted to do a reading of just the illustrations and my eyes were drawn to the text no matter what. This shows a really nice eye for design in the text placement. It’s hard to quite say why I like where the text is placed, but I very much do.
Told mostly in panels that progress the story (what on earth is that called? Someone used it the other day and I can’t remember for the life of me), There Is a Tribe of Kids is rich with things to pick out in the images. Our eyes pour over the detail in the child’s clothing, to how it acts like each animal, and the feelings of loneliness or inclusion that each image gives. There is a really nice contrast between the huge amount of texture and the balance of the very clean lines of the animals. Many of the panels do not share this clean outline but instead end into white space with a raw edge. The colors are enigmatic and beautiful. I expected the entire book to stay in a vaguely sepia-toned palette which is so popular in design right now, but was stunned when I got to the jellyfish and whales.
This book conveys such a wonderful sense of movement. I very much want to try this one with some preschoolers to see if we could pretend to be the animals/scenery. I’m also really impressed by how perfect the text is. There’s a nice... not joke, but something... with the “There Is a Tribe of Kids” vs the first line “There was a tribe of kids” and then the reverse for the last two lines. I also love the collective nouns and even for those things that don’t have a real collective noun (night of dreams, ocean of blue) Smith found the perfect words.