JOURNEY, by Aaron Becker

Quick Facts:
- 2014 Caldecott Honor Book
- wordless picturebook
- 37 pages

Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson, was always a magical and yet frustrating experience for me. Though my imagination was captured by the idea of a child creating an entirely new world using only a crayon, I desperately wished Harold would draw more. The sparse, purple and white of Harold's world was suggestive, but I wanted the dream fully realized, to explore with my eyes the tiny details of Harold's creations.

Though I didn't realize it when I opened the book, Journey is what I was looking for in Harold.

Journey's protagonist is a young girl with practically cropped hair and a profound loneliness. Her mother is busy cooking dinner when the girl wants to play outside; her father has too much work to fly a kite with her; her teenage sister is more interested in online connection than kicking around a ball with the girl. Furthermore, the city setting of the girl's home suggests that she can go no further than her own front stoop on her own.

From the very first illustration opposite the dedication page, author and illustrator Aaron Becker uses color not only to set the tone of the story but to represent his protagonist's imagination and desires. The girl's city home life he draws in shades of brown and gray, which serve not only to reflect the oppressive and bleak nature of the girl's daily reality, but to allow her ideas to stand out in stark contrast. In a succession of frames showing the girl approaching each member of her family, Becker uses the color red to make clear for the reader what his protagonist is seeking from each person (and thus also what she is subsequently denied). With her mother, she props a red scooter against the kitchen counter. She drags a red kite behind her while peering over her father's shoulder at the computer. She rests her arms and chin on a bright red ball as she sadly watches a sister more interested in a screen than in her.

Red is thus more than the color of the girl's various favorite activities. Red represents her longing for connection, for escape. Thus, when the reader spies a red crayon on the girl's bedroom floor, the red color makes it stand out instantly as something meaningful to the girl. My own history with Harold led me to suppose that the creative nature of a crayon could make it a means of escape, and in fact that is precisely what it proves to be. Using her crayon, the girl draws a door on her wall, through which she embarks on one of the most beautiful, and richly imagined adventures I've ever found in a book.

I will not detail here the course of her journey, as I think it would do future readers a disservice. Rather, I'll highlight a few things I found particularly effective and notable about the author's storytelling. As one might expect, the young girl's world explodes with color as soon as she passes through her constructed gateway. However, red consistently remains the color of the protagonist's imagination. It serves to continuously ground the story in the young girl's imagination, despite the intricacy of the world now surrounding her. For example, there is a two-page spread across which splays a magnificent castle, complete with a moat, domed ceilings, and rolling landscapes. It is easy at first to get lost studying the tiny details- Is that a windmill in the distance? Are those gondolas making their way across the castle walls? Everything is beautifully rendered, but it is rendered in shades of blue, green, and gold, so that the one detail that jumps from the page above all others is the girl's tiny red boat, approaching the castle from the bottom left corner of the illustration. This serves to remind us that everything unfolding before that tiny red boat is a product of the girl's vivid imagination, and re-establishes her as the focus of the story.

Like Harold, the girl in Journey often must think quickly to "draw" a new part of the adventure. However, unlike Harold, the girl's red crayon always draws a means of transportation. She draws a boat, a hot air balloon, a magic carpet- I would argue that even the initial door she drew was a means of transportation, as it was the gateway that allowed her into the imagined world and set her on her adventure. In this way, Becker suggests that imagination is more than a means of creating pretty images; it is a source of movement, of travel. Imagination, his images suggest, will move you forward just as surely as your feet.

Nearly halfway through the story, the girl encounters a new color that shapes and propels forward the remainder of her journey. I won't say more here, but I will note that the twist at the story's end makes me suspect Becker may have shared some of my reactions to Harold and his purple crayon.

Ultimately, Journey is a story of the places imagination can take us, and the connection those experiences have in shaping our daily reality.