I recently learned of Isol, and read Daytime Visions. I’m now working through all of her work I can find.
If you don’t know Isol, she is a picture book artist from Argentina. Her work has won many awards, including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. This praise is greatly deserved, as she is very much the artist.
In practice, this means three things. First, her work is very high quality. Second, she’s clearly following and realizing her own vision. And third, her work is not much like other picture books. That’s very much the case with Loose Threads. It is several times as long as most picture books, so much so that it is divided into several titled sections. Pick it up and it feels like chapter book aimed at older readers…but every pages is both richly illustrated and designed for impact.
It is built around a common truth about kids: kids lose things. Or rather, kids lose things so well that the adults in their lives can’t figure out why, how, or where things are going. In the case of Leilah, she realizes the things she’s losing are disappearing into the holes in the world, passing from our world to the Other Side, a realm that seems somewhere between the dreamtime experienced by Australian aboriginal peoples and a (somewhat tamed) Lovecraftian dimension where inhumane entities abide.
Leilah decides to put an end to losing things by sewing up the holes in the world, an ambitious act that upsets the balance of her world and has to be redone.
All kids–and all cool adults–will enjoy looking at the images in Loose Threads. However, the story will appeal mainly to older, thoughtful, even philosophical kids. Though the styles are very different, it pairs well with The Bear Who Wasn’t There and the Fabulous Forest.
