“We are all just hearts / beating in the darkness.” In All the Beating Hearts, poet Julie Fogliano and illustrator Cátia Chien take readers on an impressionistic journey by means of a single day, capturing the inside and exterior worlds of people.
Fogliano’s textual content captures pleasure, surprise, tedium and sorrow. “Each day starts with the sun / and hopefully something to eat,” Fogliano writes, acknowledging meals shortage. Most of us spend our days on the transfer, spending our hours on “work / or play / or work AND PLAY.” Some days are stuffed with love, and “some days we will curl up / and wish to be / any / other / place.”
When evening arrives, we slip into desires, and our hearts beat with the message that “we are here / and alive / together but apart / the same, but exactly different.” Fogliano repeats that phrase, “the same, but exactly different” towards the finish of the ebook as properly, providing a refreshing antidote to the we’re-not-so-different platitudes of seemingly progressive image books that, in observe, deny variations comparable to race, gender and incapacity.
Chien meets Fogliano’s evocative phrases with lush, atmospheric illustrations awash with shade. In a wordless unfold depicting an evening of desires, youngsters float in an summary cloud rendered in heat shades of rose and yellow, surrounded by scribbled amorphous creatures. In one other unfold, a toddler illustrated in full shade and backlit by a shiny mild stands in a crowd of folks all drawn in jagged shades of grey. “Everyone is busy being / everywhere and everything else / and all those beating hearts / are still there, but struggling / to be heard above it all.”
The connections between these hearts, which beat inside us “strong and steady and sure,” is the stuff of life, Fogliano appears to be saying. This tender, compassionate image ebook invitations readers to ponder this notion with surprise—and all of their hearts.
Discussion about this post