Wendy Anderson Halperin

This book illustrates St. Paul's biblical passage about love from 1st Corinthians (1 Cor 13:4-8) Each double page spread contains a line of text at the bottom, with the rest of the space dedicated to detailed drawings. Every inch is filled with colour and patterns.

Many pictures come in mirror-image pairs with the left side showing a negative example and the right side showing a positive example. There are also long strips of images that tell stories showing the passage of time. I recognized examples from everyday life, nature, fairy tales, and children's stories. In the bottom left and bottom right corners of each page is a picture; one shows a process of destruction, and the other, a process of creation over time as you progress through the book.

This is a beautiful picture book, and you can tell a lot of thought went into its planning. It is full of illustrated examples to discuss with a child to help understand St. Paul's words in a concrete way.

This title is appropriate for anytime, but I especially recommend it for Quinquagesima Sunday (the one before Ash Wednesday) because the epistle for that Mass is 1 Cor 13 in the Tridentine calendar.… (más)

I bought it sight unseen because Homeplace is such a nice book.
Let’s Go Home explores the spaces of a house in living detail. Rylant puts in details like kisses on the head in the kitchen. Halperin litters all the spaces with toys, in particular. The front porch is claimed by the girls on a summer day; and that reflects my childhood to a T. (We had a wraparound porch, and the side part was permanently ours.). There are few rooms, no dining room and no basement, but what there are serve multiple purposes. Mama sets up her sewing machine in the living room; the attic stores paint buckets and basement-y things besides attic-y things. There is a bit of a Mary Englebreit feel to the place.
I will be exploring more of this illustrator’s work in the next month or so.… (más)