The perfect picture book is one in which pictures and text blend together into a seamless unified whole world held in two hands. When this magic happens, then that book appeals to all age categories. This is what Katia Novet Saint-Lot and Dimitrea Tokunbo have accomplished in their new book, Amadi’s Snowman (Tilbury House, 2008).
From the first sentence of this book, when Amadi is introduced while “crouched in the shrubs, stalking a red-headed lizard,” until the last words “And he ran down the dirt path, his heart filled with joy,” he leaps out as a completely delightful small boy, who considers himself “an Igbo man of Nigeria.” Although his mother urges him to let a neighbor teach him to read, Amadi sees no room for that nonsense in his future. He plans to be a businessman and knows exactly how to begin this enterprise–reading is unnecessary.
Wandering through the market while mulling over his business plan, Amadi finds an older boy immersed in a book. Caught by a picture of a world covered in white and a boy standing beside a large white figure with a carrot for a nose, Amadi discovers that his own world is far smaller than he ever imagined. With awakened curiosity, he begins to hunger for facts that can only be provided by breaking the secret code of print on a page.
And yet this book is so much more than this simple plot summary. With precise and evocative descriptions of Amadi’s world, Katia Novet Saint-Lot plunges readers into the color and beauty of Nigerian village life, while making Amadi such a vivid character that as he runs down the dirt path and away from his readers on the final page, he leaves us hoping for a sequel. Dimitrea Tokunbo’s glowing paintings bring motion and light and detail to the words, truly illuminating the text by showing readers exactly what Amadi sees every day.
This is a celebration of literacy that takes us back to the yearning and hunger that made us readers, while giving us a new world that we will yearn and hunger to learn more about, no matter how young–or old–we may be.