Review of Celeste A Day in the Park by Martin Matje

I am all in favor of children's books having a moral. In the tradition of some of Dr. Seuss's greatest stories, my personal favorite being Horton Hears A Who, I think picture books can be persuasive without being moralistic or scary or threatening. Matje's Celeste is clever in ways that parents will appreciate and is silly in ways kids will appreciate, and manages to teach a lesson at the same time.

The story is about a little girl, Celeste, and her "pet," a teddy bear named Timovitc Radetski (who goes by the nickname Tim). The plot is quite simple: Celeste and Tim head to the park for a picknick where a duck steals one of Celeste's vanilla cucumber sandwiches. Celeste, outraged by the duck's unrestrained theft of her sandwich, runs after him. A large (VERY LARGE) police officer intervenes on the duck's behalf, and Celeste is left powerless.

Matje has rapidly brought the story to a complex situation and one that suggests the powerlessness that must be a frustratingly common experience for kids. The solution, however, is wonderfully simple. Tim steps in, negotiates between Celeste and the duck, and resolves the standoff. The final pages show that all it took to make peace was three sandwiches, one for Tim, one for Celeste and one for the duck!

That Matje wrote and illustrated the book must have led to the integration of text and picture. Many pages have lettering incorporated into the illustration, or in places where there is "regular text" special words are set off in color, in a different size, or in a cursive-type script. The words become a part of the dynamic, graphic composition.

Most of the watercolor illustrations have the types of details kids love to pick out: a taxi on the city street, a bird and some bees or a snail and some flowers, all found in the park. The way Matje draws Celeste reflects careful observation of real children. She has a range of emotional states, she is either calm and contented or she is hysterical, anxious, stunned, or chagrined. The dramatic expressions she exhibits would make it easy for any child to "read" how she feels in a given situation.

But my favorite part is that in the end Celeste makes things right by letting go of her inital selfish impulse and nuturing her newfound friends with homemade sandwiches. We can't always expect our children to instinctively share or to automatically think of others, but we can hope that with a little coaxing they'll see the value of compromise.