Adrienne Pettinelli captured the heart of Kevin Henkes’s work in her Horn Book review of his picture book The World and Everything in It (May/June 2023): “Henkes’s strength is in the poetry of the everyday and finding the profound in ordinary moments.” Finding Things, written by Henkes and illustrated by his wife, Laura Dronzek, focuses on just a portion of the greater world — a ball, a flower, a box, and a kitten. But reading this book in the context of the other (which the actual committee would not do, as they can only focus on the book at hand, not the illustrator’s other works), has helped me see something more profound in this seemingly simple picture book in my many readings. I’ll get at these things as I proceed through the elements of the bookmaking. 

The book itself has been published with a square trim size, comfortable in small hands and perhaps more intimate and cozy than a larger trim size would have been. The dust jacket inaugurates the idea of a dog finding things and the idea that, though we are focusing on four things throughout the book, there is the rest of the world out there, too: the sky, a butterfly, someone holding that leash, a bush, other flowers beyond the one later found. The full-bleed acrylic dust-jacket painting establishes the idea that this scene is part of the larger world. A philosophical subtlety.

Turn to the case cover, and the world is circumscribed, a flower no longer in a full-bleed illustration extending to the world, but framed, within borders. This story is not to be everything in the world; this book will be our subset of ball, flower, box, and kitten. The endpapers — front and back are the same — are a favorite Henkes/Dronzek element: boxes, checkerboard style, foreshadowing the finding of things and putting them in boxes. And this process works its way throughout the book: the red ball on the grass in a full-bleed illustration; the next page has the ball and the dog framed within red borders. Similarly, the flower is within a full-bleed painting, then in a glass with water within a frame, this time purple. And so on, until all four — ball, flower, box, and kitten — are cozy within boxes on the same page. These four boxes are the same as the top left-hand boxes of the endpapers, though not fully framed. And, in the final pages, the four things have a way of finding their way into other boxes, crossing borders — the kitten in the box, the dog with flower and kitten, the kitten and ball and dog, and all plus girl in the final illustration. “If you found all these things, you would be lucky.”

A kitten, a place to sleep, something nice to look at, something fun to play with... “Everyone would be happy.” As Julie Danielson noted in her Horn Book review, this is the world reduced to its essentials and made important because “the child took the time to notice them.” Finding Things is the world writ small, but it’s part of the larger world of things we all want. We count ourselves lucky to find them, and happy if we take time to notice them.

I hope the Caldecott Committee will give this book a close look and see the profound in the simple, beautifully rendered art by Laura Dronzek and words by Kevin Henkes.

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Finding Things]