Nothing Ever Happens On My Block

written and illustrated by  
Ellen Raskin  
Atheneum  1980 


While a boy sits and mopes there's plenty of things going on that he casually seems to ignore.   

In some ways Chester Filbert is like many kids who complain of nothing to do in a world where adults are more than happy to point out all the possibilities.  There Chester sits, a figure clad in black against a line drawing of his street full of houses with more Victorian gingerbreading than any historical town you can name. Soon people appear, in bright primary colors, kids playing ding-dong-ditch and girls jumping rope, a window washer, a gardner, a thief, a fire and a fire truck. All the while Filbert complains, comparing his dull block to places that have marching bands and haunted houses and pirates, basically everything he'd like to see instead of acknowledging the excitement bustling around him. Accidents pile up around Chester, kids get hurt, cars crash, an armored car dumps money everywhere and Chester goes home having decided that when he grows up he's going to move away from this crummy place.  

In he picture book game there are books where the reader can see more than the character can – I know there are others but I'm at a loss to recall them right now – making the story interactive and a bit of a game. Here, Raskin takes a common childhood complaint as her source and it works, but...

But I wonder when books play this game of "see how foolish the main character is behaving," especially picture books and early readers, if the message backfires. What happens when the reader identifies with the main character and, as in this case, can point out how preposterous the scene is while complaining that these same things never happen on the reader's block as well. The reader ends up feeling even more justified; not only don't they have thieves and police giving chase and trucks dumping money at their feet they also don't have haunted houses or parades either. Instead of being able to say to a reader "There's plenty of things happening if you open your eyes!" this narrative provides young readers the ammunition to say "Yeah? Like what?" 

Maybe there's an alternate reading to this story, something I haven't considered. What if this was the sort of thing that happened on Chester's street every day and he had become so numbed to it that all he longs for are the things he's never seen before. Or what if, what if everything we the reader sees is spectral, the ghosts of things and people that once lived on that street and now, like that kid in The Sixth Sense, appear to him in his ennui begging for the closure he has no interest in giving them? Why else would they all appear in monochrome from head to toe if these were not these shade's shades?

Okay, perhaps too close a reading, too unfair to over generalize. But let me ask if this book could be written or published today. Would we accept a main character who is unchanged at the end, a story where only the reader has (perhaps) been moved forward in their thinking?  It reads a little like a concept story with no resolution, the first act of a three-act play.

It's funny, because I don't feel this way about If I Ran the Circus and it's otherwise resolution-free story. Perhaps because in the act of imagining there is a celebration of creativity at hand where Nothing Ever Happens... is the antithesis of creativity, it's simply a list of complaints from a child who wants the world handed to them and can't be bothered to think about anything other than what's wrong.

And after all that, I still sorta like this book. I like the size (again a smaller picture book, about 6"x7") and I like the unchanging background with the action layered on top, like the various layers in multiplane animation. Color highlights aside, the details of the line drawing beg for closer inspection, though it might have been nice if they hid some secrets among their curves. Is it too much to wish for a gargoyle or a nest of birds with a little hatchling action? Now see, there I go, acting like Chester and longing for things that aren't while ignoring the things that are.

Who, Said Sue, Said Whoo?

written and illustrated by Ellen Raskin  
Atheneum  1973  

As Sue drives her jalopy she encounters any number of creatures that say any number of things, but the chitter-chatter mystery sends them running for cover.  And then there's that moral...   

In this cumulative story a young woman drivers her car across the landscape encountering any number of sounds. Each page answers the mystery of the sound from before while adding a new one to the coda that asks "The who, said Sue / Said chitter-chitter-chatter..." Throughout it isn't always obvious for readers to guess the animal making the noises – a cow says moo, but a goose goes "quitter-quatter," sounds mostly chosen for their rhythm within the story. In the end it turns out the chitter-chitter-chatter was coming from the engine compartment of the car... and made by a skunk, which sends the collected animals and Sue running.  

Were the book to end there it would be serviceable, certainly no worse than any number of picture books put out today, but Raskin leaves the reader with an interesting parting thought in the form of a moral. As the skunk drives off in Sue's car accompanied by a chimp with a cold the words "Moral: Words aren't everything" hang above the illustration. If the book's central question was in understanding the sounds different creatures made, only to discover that sometimes there are much greater mysteries afoot, what are we to make of the chimp and skunk taking off together? It's clear the implication that the chimp cannot smell the skunk and thus has nothing to fear, but were we supposed to be afraid of these unusual noises before discovering their origin?  This isn't clear, and the disconnect between this last line, the rest of the text, and the imagery is confusing at best.  

Raskin again provides textured line drawings and bold colors surrounded by a lot of white space, in addition to the smaller 7 by 8 inch size. The book is intimate and cute but in its efforts to moralize comes up short and unsatisfying.

Spectacles

 written and illustrated by Ellen Raskin 
Atheneum  1976   

When a girl named Iris begins mistaking the fantastical for everyday items an eye exam is on order in a picture book by the author of The Westing Game...

Iris starts out by telling the reader that she didn't always wear glasses, but then one day a dragon showed up at her door.  Then came the pygmy nuthatch, the Indian, the chestnut mare. What Iris saw were the general shapes of different things that would come together to create something her brain could make sense of. The dragon, for example, turned out to be her Aunt Fanny standing against a tree, a house, and a trail that made the whole look more menacing by the sum of its parts. Finally, Iris goes to the eye doctor who gives her the bad news: she needs glasses. Iris fights all of her options when they are described by color and shape, but when her mother re-frames the question – "Would you like to look older or younger, sweeter or smarter, like a scholar or a movie star..." – Iris is instantly more interested in glasses. In the end Iris is happier wearing her spectacles but still takes them off once in a while for a glimpse at the spectacles she used to see.

Spreads feature Iris on the left side in a line drawing with what she sees done up in pointillist shading against a solid color, followed in the next spread by the same arrangement but this time with the scene clearly delineated and in full color. Ignoring that many of the things Iris sees would hardly remain stationary enough for her to hold these shapes, to say nothing of items like a TV which she couldn't have confused, there is still a bit of squinty-eyed whimsy at the way Iris approaches life. Too young perhaps to realize she's having eyesight problems (it happened to me in third grade so I can relate) she is fairly good-natured about the whole experience until she finds she has to wear glasses.

The concept has been done since, by Suzy Lee in particular, and perhaps before Raskin did it, but for a thirty-five year old it doesn't feel too dated or stodgy. Change "Native American" for "Indian" and I think it would be fine. 

There is something very 1960s mod in her style of illustration, and very approachable. In fact, what initially startled me was that it was small for a picture book. At just under 6 x 8 inches – one-fourth the size of many picture books today – the book's intimacy draws in a reader's attention. Almost as if the book had been designed with a nearsighted reader in mind. But it raises an interested question today as many publishers point out the high cost of producing picture books: why not simply make them smaller? Not every book needs to e lap-sized, and an argument can be made for picture books to be manageable for younger readers. Just a thought.

I only discovered this week that Raskin was also an illustrator and began her career (as many illustrators do) working on other's books before writing and illustrating her own. In fact, she is responsible for the iconic woodcut illustrations for the New Directions edition of A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, a book I've owned and replaced without ever making the connection. A quick Google search for Ellen Raskin illustrations yields a number of surprises, including book covers I have seen before including adult titles like A Passage to India and a Nathaniel West collection.