The picture book Scroll by Hui Lu (Christy Ottaviano Books, September 2023) teaches about Chinese characters and calligraphy with an imaginative dialog and dream featuring a grandfather and his granddaughter. This illustrated and imaginative approach to learning about the character-based language is a perfect match for a young child to become engaged and interested in learning the concept.
I loved the author-illustrator’s incorporation of Chinese characters as she tells an imaginative story. The girl steps through the characters for “door” into a dream-like village. In the following pages, just about every element of the story is illustrated in Chinese ink as the Chinese character in the midst of the scene: the bird, rice, chestnut tree, flowers, grass, and so forth. The township building is labeled with the character for township! The man is shaped like the character for man and shown threshing his wheat (which is of course the character for wheat!), even though his arm (a part of the Chinese character) is bent toward the wheat. Light watercolor provides background and illustrates the girl’s presence in the scene.
Scroll contains both front matter and backmatter. Before the dream-like scene begins, a paragraph of printed text describes the origin of the picturelike writing (oracle bones and telling fortunes) and as well as a one sentence story frame of a grandfather teaching a granddaughter calligraphy. A page also shows a variety of images that were carved, even thousands of years ago.. The backmatter contains the author’s notes.
In some respects, the front matter felt like it distracted from the imagination part of the story and I feel many might flip open the book, see the paragraph of historical text, and abandon the book. For the parent and child who do turn one more page, they’ll see a story told almost like a comic with handwriting-like text in speech bubbles. As a whole, Lulu’s dream of escaping a fiery dragon will will give the reader more of an understanding of Chinese characters as a pictorial writing language than reading paragraphs of historical text would do. I wish the author had included all the background information as backmatter instead of at the front in order to eliminate the distraction from the actual story.
