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Hopkinson, Deborah

The Story of a Story

40 pp. | Holiday/Porter | November, 2021 | Trade ISBN 978-0-8234-4491-5 $18.99
(2) K-3 Illustrated by Hadley Hooper. In an inviting second-person, present-tense voice, Hopkinson (Butterflies Belong Here, rev. 1/21; We Must Not Forget, rev. 3/21) captures a writer's struggle to kick-start a narrative: "You arrive with a pencil or two" as well as "all the invisible things that make you...you." Hooper (Two Brothers, Four Hands, rev. 3/19; The Elephants Come Home, rev. 7/21) depicts a child who comes in from the snow to a cozy interior and promptly sits down at a table by the window to write--but nothing comes. Frustrated, the child falls prey to distractions (reading favorite books, chomping on cookies). Suddenly, from the window the child spots a chickadee, determinedly working to feed itself by plucking seeds from a feeder. The writer, feeling encouraged, understands that it's time to return to the empty page. Just as the bird patiently worked seed by seed, with great concentration, writers must start by focusing on merely "one word. And then another." Hooper's illustrations in a wintry palette of cool blues capture the child's lively facial expressions and ever-changing body language. In one striking spread, she brings readers an inverted view of the chickadee; it hangs upside down from the feeder, but we see it right-side up, so the image of the child watching from the window is flipped. Hopkinson's story about a story, which closes with a writing prompt (about a chickadee, no less) is genuinely inspiring, a tutorial on writer's block that never patronizes the child readers at whom it's aimed.
Reviewer: Julie Danielson | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2022

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