Mr. Williams (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mr. Williams Karen Coats Barbour, Karen Mr. Williams; written and illus. by Karen Barbour. Holt, 2005 [32p] ISBN 0-8050-6773-6$16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad 5-8 yrs Born in 1929, Mr. Williams grew up on a farm in Louisiana. He had six brothers and five sisters, who all helped with planting and harvesting just about everything that would grow in Louisiana soil, from cotton to melons to sugarcane to oats. The author creates a straightforward, deliberately artless first-person voice for Mr. Williams to tell of his daily life of chores, family life, and recreation throughout the southern year. He doesn't editorialize or offer comment on how he felt about his life, but he does emphasize that his family had no electricity or running water and that his five-mile walk to school was occasionally punctuated by a white man who would run him off the road. Barbour uses gouache and collage to create illustrations touched with naïve style, picking out the flat figures and landscape features with heavy black outlines accented with hatchmarks that suggest woodcuts. The triangular, expressionless faces with their horizontally elongated eyes give her figures an otherworldly serenity as they move through their surreally colorful surroundings. There is no narrative arc to the story, nor is there a mandate to relate this man's particular history as a result of any subsequent fame or fortune. Rather, it seems that Barbour is performing an act of preservation in the Mary Azarian vein, reminding children of a time and lifestyle long distant from their experience and paying homage to the ordinary, hard-working folk of days gone by; young audiences may therefore need some external assistance to make their stake in the narrative clear, but this could offer contemporary kids a window into a way of life far removed from their own experience. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois