by Dianne White, illustrated by Barroux
Owlkids Books (2020) | ISBN 9781771473736
A day in the neighborhood begins with a chalk wall to draw on, a water wall to splash in, a climbing wall to clamber up, and a great wall of kids playing together. But it isn’t long before a wall comes between them, and one child is left out. After all the name-calling and hurt feelings, reflection and regret, is there a way these ex-friends can make amends?
Simple rhyming text is layered with playful illustrations to explore the many forms that walls can take – as well as the myriad feelings that accompany them. SOMETIMES A WALL… will inspire readers to scale walls of their own, with imagination and empathy.
A Word from the author, Dianne White:
When I speak with kids, I tell them that ideas for stories live in the middle of our everyday lives. For me, these ideas begin small – a spark of inspiration as I go about the day, a few words rolling around in my head, a vague sense of a subject I’d like to explore.
The idea for SOMETIMES A WALL… began as a conversation with a friend about walls. Specifically, the way a child she had seen couldn’t pass by a short wall without hopping up, finding his balance, walking to the end, and grinning with the feeling of his accomplishment.
Do you remember being a child and feeling that same urge to conquer a wall? That’s where the idea for SOMETIMES A WALL began. But it didn’t stay there. Soon, I began thinking about all sorts of walls.
Some are fun! A chalk wall. A rock wall. The wall of water created by a fountain. The walls we build when playing with blocks. The walls that rise when we make a fort with blankets and pillows.
Other times, the fort-building that started out as a fun activity turns a corner, and someone gets excluded.
Leaving someone “out” and others “in” can look a million different ways. It doesn’t matter how young or old we are, each of us has an example of what this looks like. It’s both a timely and a timeless topic.
The second piece of my “walls” idea was that I wanted to keep the text short. I’d long admired Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s picture book, GREEN and wondered if there was a way to write a story using a similar pattern of two words. The first word would change and the second would remain the same. Almost like bricks or blocks, stacked one atop another.
It took months of playing with words before I settled on a version that captured the story I wanted to tell. The illustrator, Barroux, picked up where the words left off. It was a great pleasure to watch him bring his own creative vision to the story telling.
What kinds of walls – both physical and metaphorical – do kids encounter? What will they do, as the story proposes, with the “many ways a wall can be?” How will a child respond to the “different sides and points of view” they run into at school, home, and the world beyond?
It’s my hope that SOMETIMES A WALL… can be one among many books that serve as a springboard to conversations about empathy and friendship, conflict and resolution.
RESOURCES:
Together. Apart. Regret. New Start?
A lesson in 3 Movements…
• 1st Movement : TOGETHER (I Walk with Vanessa by Kerascoët)
• 2nd Movement: APART (Draw the Line by Kathryn Otoshi)
• 3rd Movement: REGRET. NEW START? (Sometimes a Wall… by Dianne
White, illustrated by Barroux)
• BE KIND coloring page
• WE ARE KIND coloring page
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JOIN the VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH with Dianne and illustrator Barroux (zooming in from Paris!) on October 24, 2020 at 10:00 am (Pacific)