Boy Here, Boy There
by Chuck Groenink; illus. by the author
Primary    Tundra    56 pp.
10/24    9781774881064    $18.99
e-book ed.  9781774881071    $10.99

In luminous paintings and a spare, telegraphic text, Groenink tells the story of a brief encounter between a Neanderthal boy and a child of a different human species, perhaps Homo sapiens. Snub-nosed “boy” wanders away from his cave and family, down the mountain to a river valley, where he glimpses another boy on the far bank, a stranger. Their eyes meet. Back home that night, “boy,” remembering how the other human raised his hand in greeting, presses a sooty handprint onto the cave wall. The pared-down text, built from pairs of contrasts—here/there, behind/ahead, alone/together, far/close, standing/moving—packs the emotional punch of poetry. The illustrations, as lush as the text is restrained, glow with golden light and their own set of opposites: dim cave and sun-infused valley, an aerial view down the cliffs to the river, the view from the ground up into the high tree canopy. The message here, entirely unstated but unmistakable, involves a benign portrait of our human encounters with the “other” and our need to tell stories. In this lovely offering, “boy” joins such other classic Stone Age heroes as Tankard’s Edwin from Me Hungry! and Briggs’s Ug from Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age (rev. 11/02). An author’s note and a list of scholarly sources remind readers of the dynamism and excitement of the field of archaeology.

From the ">January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.