Hanna Cha / Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
A little bit boy is going on a quest — into two very other forests — to find the reality about dragons. “You will have to put your favourite cloak round your shoulders and your sturdiest boots upon your ft,” Julie Leung writes in her Caldecott Honor kids’s guide, The Fact About Dragons. “Depart on an afternoon when the air is crisp as new paper, the wind is delicate, and the skies are transparent.” Within the first wooded area, stuffed with outdated, gnarled oak timber, the kid evades mischievous hobgoblins, mossy bridges, sparkling will-o’-the-wisps, and winding brooks earlier than arriving at a yellow cottage in the midst of a boggy swamp.
There lives a smart lady who tells him the reality about dragons. “Dragons are fearsome and fire-breathing, my kid,” the sensible lady says, “with wings like a bat’s and the frame of a lizard. Piercing horns grace their reptilian heads.” And that, needless to say, is one reality about dragons. However our hero nonetheless has any other adventure to move on.
Hanna Cha / Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
“The guide used to be impressed by means of my firstborn son,” explains Julie Leung. “We had debated so much about which remaining identify to offer him. My husband having a quite common Americanized identify that is synonymous with a soup corporate, and me having one that is all the time been historically slightly more difficult to pronounce.” Leung used to be grappling with the theory of her son rising up feeling like he wanted to make a choice from cultures — his mother’s Chinese language heritage or his father’s American heritage. So she grew to become to folklore. “There may be such other interpretations of the dragon mythology between Jap and Western cultures,” Leung says, “it is a very best metaphor.”
The Fact About Dragons
Hanna Cha / Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
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Hanna Cha / Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
To depict the 2 mythologies, Hanna Cha illustrated the guide in two utterly other kinds. “I determined to make use of pen nibs for the primary part of the guide,” says Cha. “I were given impressed by means of numerous the older folktales and storybooks. And I beloved how in the ones books they use borders to create a separate layer that provides to the tale.” Within the first part of the guide, the pages are lush and heat. A border of timber and leaves, plant life and mushrooms, frames every web page. The sensible lady’s cottage is filled with rough-hewn wood furniture and a stone fireplace. Dried plant life grasp from the ceiling, a cauldron bubbles away over a hearth. “Her area smells of cedar chests, sugar cookies, and apple cider,” Leung writes.
Then, halfway throughout the guide, after the sensible lady provides our hero one reality about dragons — mainly that they’re all like Smaug from The Hobbit, sitting on piles of treasure and capturing flames at trespassers — the little boy steps over and out of the border of the primary tale, and immediately into any other.
Hanna Cha / Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
Now the illustrations are ethereal and funky — vegetables and blues substitute the nice and cozy reds and browns of yore. The borders have disappeared. The oak timber were uprooted by means of a bamboo wooded area. The kid is guided by means of nine-tailed foxes, ghostly maidens, and the white rabbit who dwells at the moon. “For the second one part I used sumi ink and calligraphy brushes,” explains Cha. “Those brushes are stunning brushes from Korean people artwork. For me, I am extra comfy doing brushes. That has been maximum of my paintings previously.” As a substitute of a swampy cottage, the second one sensible lady lives in a palace overlooking a towering waterfall. It smells of jasmine and incense. She beverages chrysanthemum tea in a tiny porcelain bowl. And, in fact, she is aware of any other reality about dragons. “Dragons are majestic creatures of air and fireplace,” Leung writes. “They rule within the skies and rivers, commanding the rain to fall and the floodwaters to upward push.” Hanna Cha says she gave cautious attention to how she’d draw the 2 dragons on this tale another way. The fireplace-breathing Western dragon is deep crimson — at the web page the place you meet it, the border is produced from dented armor and bits of skeletons, proof of its damaging powers. The god-like Jap dragon is sort of airy — it strikes throughout the air like swirls of sunshine blue liquid. “I additionally in reality occupied with numerous the dynamic actions of the way the dragons would transfer,” says Cha. “For the blue dragon, I imagined it more or less twisting and turning, serpent-like… this very majestic motion… And for the crimson dragon, I made certain to create this weight this is nearly immovable, nearly indestructible.”
Hanna Cha / Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
The general public suppose they’ve to make a choice from the 2 dragons — crimson or blue, fearsome or holy, Jap or Western mythologies. However on the finish of his quest, our hero learns the actual reality about dragons.
“I feel so much in regards to the ways in which we describe blended or mixed or part. There may be numerous terminology we use once we discuss children who’re coming from other cultural and racial backgrounds,” says creator Julie Leung. “And I would like the theory of my child’s long run feeling love it is doubled, it’s enriched, it’s infinite.” Or, because the omniscient narrator (in truth his mom), tells the little boy, “Inside of your center is the place the 2 forests meet. Each trips are yours to take. Each worlds are yours to find.”
