Last year’s Wait by Antoinette Portis was a wonderfully simple but profound paean to children’s ability to observe and take notice while adults rush rush rush everywhere and miss everything, from tiny ladybugs to glorious rainbows. This year’s Now is not all that different: it focuses on a young girl living fully in the moment as she plays, eats, drinks, smells a flower, climbs a tree, sings, etc.

I did love Wait; and because I loved Wait I was eager to read Now. And I think that’s only natural. According to Caldecott rules, committee members may not compare books of previous years to books of the current year. But it’s impossible to shut the earlier books out absolutely. I think how it works with me is: a book might get an initial leg up because of my admiration for its illustrator’s previous work — I might move that book up to the top of the pile — but once I start looking at a book in earnest, using the Caldecott criteria, all that falls away and it stands alone, to be measured only against its fellow 2017 contenders.

So, Now. In terms of the criteria’s “delineation of theme...through the pictures,” it excels. It’s really pretty much all theme, this picture book: an exhortation to mindfulness. The artist’s choice of media supports the theme beautifully, with the brushstrokes creating a palpable texture and giving a sensory quality to the art. Look at the “This is my favorite breeze” spread: you can feel the breeze; see it as it crosses the girl's face. “This is my favorite mud”: yep, that’s some thick, gloppy, muddy mud. And “my favorite song”: I love how the song is represented, as a spiral yellow brushstroke emanating from the girl’s open mouth.

I’m not sure this effect carries through the whole book (some spreads, for instance the cloud spread, is much less intense), but perhaps it would be difficult to sustain — or perhaps too boring! For instance, I like that the book shakes the theme up a bit (humorously!) with “This is my favorite tooth / because it’s the one that is missing” and "This was my favorite boat" as her paper boat disappears down a storm drain.

The saturated colors also give the objects in the book a lushness, a solid reality: the intense red of the leaf, the concentrated brown of the mud, the deep pink of the flower — that saturation, used in service of making the viewer really LOOK at the object or experience, supports the theme, too. And Portis accomplishes all this without making her art at all hyper-realistic — a lot of it is quite abstract, in fact. See the undulating brushstroke lines that represent rushing water, for instance, or, as previously mentioned, the spiraling brushstroke lines of the girl's song. And if you are looking for background detail, don’t. White space is used generously, and effectively, to keep our attention completely on the girl and her vivid, mindfully lived, experiences. That, too, is fitting.

Now has a mindful picture-book shape, as well, as the girl moves through her day toward evening — when, home, she hugs her cat and gazes at the moon — and bedtime — where she reads a book with her mother, bringing a human, social, emotional element into a story that has previously focused mostly on individual experience, on the senses. It brings in a different way to celebrate being alive: love, family.

Now is one of those "quiet" books Patrick Gall referenced in his post about Tony. What do you think? Does Now hold its own against other quiet 2017 titles?

Read the starred Horn Book Magazine review of Now.

Save