I recently learned of Marie Hall Ets. I may have seen her name on the list of Caldecott Medal winners–she won it in 1960–but I hadn’t read anything until I saw a mention of her in a list of winners of a different award. From there I read an overview of her career, which lasted more than 30 years and included more than 20 books that she wrote and illustrated. I decided to see what she was like, and that led me to Play With Me, a 1955 picture book.
Play With Me has a very classic picture book feel to it. It has a tight focus, and a small one, but also an important one. A girl goes to a meadow to play, and asks first the grasshopper, then a frog, then a whole sequence of animals, one at a time, if the animal will play with her.
There’s one picture per page, usually arranged so the left page sets up a situation, and the right completes it: on page 2 the girl sees the grasshopper, and on page 3, the girl approaches it and it jumps away. The language is simple throughout, and there’s usually two lines of text per page. There’s a unified color scheme, largely a warm yellow of sunlight. Taken together, these factors create a cohesive whole, one a child can quickly identify and feel at ease with.
At roughly the midpoint of the book, the girl has asked all the animals she’s seen, and none will play with her. She gives up and sits on a rock where she watches a bug on the surface of the pond. And–and this is the nice twist of the book–as she is sitting there, all the animals she approached earlier comes back, one at a time. When she’s quiet, they all join her, including a fawn, who licks her cheek. And the girl is happy.
This book clearly demonstrates a number of useful principles: patients, how to deal with nature, how to focus, etc. And it is pleasant. I can see kids, especially quiet kids, liking this.
