Scribble

Scribble
Written and illustrated by Deborah Freedman
Knopf, 2007

This book starts out with two little girls drawing. Emma, the older sister, draws a beautiful princess asleep. Lucie, the young sister, draws a cat. Her big sister says it looks like a Scribble. Well, Lucie retaliates and really does draw a scribble all over Emma’s drawing. A fight ensues. When Lucie finally draws ears on her cat, the cat begins to take over the book. He wonders what the princess from the other drawing is up to. The cat drawing leaps from his picture to the princess’s picture. Finally, the princess and the cat connect and fall in love, much to the astonishment of their creators.

The illustrations begin in a comic strip fashion with several small boxes of action on each page. Even speech bubbles show the children’s conversation. Once the cat decides to let his curiosity take him to the princess, illustrations become a mass of pink and yellow. The cat was drawn on large yellow paper and the princess was drawn on pink. The scribbles that were once drawn in anger by Lucie, become a rope she swings on through the picture trying to catch up with the cat. In many ways this book reminds me of Wiesner’s Three Little Pigs because the illustrations take over the pages in such strange angles and the pigs wander in and out of the different stories, just like Lucie flies through the drawings as the cat wanders off.

This book is so entertaining. The story line just takes a typical moment of two sisters who get mad at each other, but this story has a unique twist in that the drawings take on a mind of their own. The illustrations clearly separate the girls’ story from the drawings’ story, so it makes it a feast for the eyes.

This book was nominated for the Cybils fiction picture book category.