Australia is famously a land of droughts and flooding rains. There have certainly been plenty of both recently, and Queensland has borne the brunt of much of it. Jackie French wrote Flood in response to the floods that devastated huge areas of Queensland in 2011. At least 35 people died. The whole country was affected.
Jackie French grew up in Queensland. Her family still live there. So naturally she had a strong emotional reaction to the floods. It was a personal, family emergency as well as a national one. This beautiful and moving book is Jackie's response to this disaster.
Flood starts with the end of drought.
But then the rain kept coming and coming. Too much rain. And the river went from being a friend to being an enemy.
Jackie French doesn't mention the deaths. Instead she focuses on the response to the floods. The human response.
The kindness of strangers bloomed like flowers after rain.
Quite a few pages feature the huge boardwalk that tore away and the tug that steered it safely through the maze of bridges, without causing more damage.
Bruce Whatley did an amazing job with the illustrations. He painted vertically on an easel to get the paint dripping, which adds so much to the flood soaked atmosphere of the book. A lot of his illustrations are from the dog's eye point of view. People are shown in some dangerous situations, but they are shown being rescued.
He writes a very interesting paragraph at the end describing his illustrative technique.
Humour is easy but producing illustrations that show serious emotion is a very different thing. Recently I discovered I have more success producing images that have elements of self-expression and 'art' with my left hand.
Bruce illustrated Flood with his non-dominant hand! I find that incredible- to be so talented to be able to use your non-dominant hand to get more emotion in your work.
Flood was one of my top reads of 2011. It was printed in Queensland. A copy was donated to every primary school in Australia, and my son has read it at his school. I think that's a fantastic idea. Profits from the sales of the book were donated to the Queensland Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal.
An Illustrated Year is hosted by An Abundance of Books.
3 comments:
Sapphire is a huge fan of Jackie French's books and these illustrations by Bruce Whatley are beautiful. I think I might buy the book to frame the ones of the dogs!
Wow.
This book looks gorgeous and I would likely have never heard of it if not for you. I am going to add it to my wishlist because it is so much more than a "mere" picture book and I'm always interested in something provocative. Plus, I already want to give my granddaughter Patricia Smith's poetry book Blood Dazzler which is about Hurricane Katrina. Some of the poems in that collection are from the dog's perspective. She'll eventually grow into books like these and the two seem a good complement to one another.
Thank you.
Unfortunately finding this book locally is not without many complications. I know someone who works for Scholastic here in the US. I may have to just see if she can help. I just spent over 20 mins trying to find a website where I could buy it here in the US or even through amazon but even their Eu website can't find the book.
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