Here is a Book, lush, easy and calm for story time chill

Illustrated books are a genre whose entries have certain roles. Here is a Book has the role of calming elementary-aged students down. It’s the ASMR video students watch to make them realize that everything is ok. This is the book teachers will bring out when the class needs to chill out. The carpool line is forming. Kids are certain that they can see the front-end of their dad’s car, and the teacher is simply trying to get them to sit down.  Here is a Book is the story of a book’s journey from quaint country farm with an ocean-view, to purchasing the book or reading it at school.

Those young ages don’t know lush as an adjective yet, however, it’s the perfect way to describe Here is a Book. The first two pages have our author sitting by the ocean, jotting ideas down in her notebook. They’re swirling into the pages without any rhyme or reason, trees, various farm animals and some of the products that you’d see in that area. The blurbs that show the author gradually get bigger, with text fragments laying down a metaphor between her garden and her work. Inside her studio the mandatory items like her pencils, erasers, late nights at work, work cats, crumpled drawings and more are shown.

When the work is done she pedals into the city to drop off her manuscript at the publisher’s office. They do their organizational work, ship it to the printer where the physical process of putting it together happens. Once the book is made it’s put into trucks, shipped across various landscapes and ending up in stores, schools and libraries. It’s here that kids will pick up the book and take it home to their families. The youth will relax with the book up in their room, where they’ll start their own physical creation.

Throughout this journey, young readers will be constantly at ease. The illustrations are lush, I said it again, didn’t I? Aside from being a fabulous shoegaze band, it’s one of the perfect adjectives to describe this book. There’s a meta sense of Here is a Book that children will love too. The cover has a picture of the book. The final two pages show the book on the young girl’s desk, right before she starts creating her own book. It’s an illustrated book version of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma LP cover. You’re holding the final product, yet you see a smaller version of what you’re holding shown within it. We’re all living in a simulation, and the Matrix knows what I’m thinking now and will do next. This concept will momentarily trip kids out, but the lush (there it is again…) illustrations will bring them back.

Here is a Book is a calm book. It’s also motivational in the sense that it just might get kids thinking about the cause and effect of certain things. Young children don’t know exactly how books are made and this provides a big-picture view for them. The illustrations are the hazy, roughed out realism that is defined enough to make kids feel like big kids, but vague enough to where they can envision themselves anywhere in the book. There are other illustrated books about the process of making books that are funnier or more surreal, but that’s not the purpose of this one. Those kids will tune out during Here is a Book and come back to class when the bell rings, the teacher calls on them or someone farts. This book is designed to be a calm illustrated book friend that might teach kids to learn to love to read, to which is does with easygoing charm.

Here is a Book is by Elisha Cooper and is available on Abrams Books for Young Readers.

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