Jordan Scott's Blog

My Baba’s Garden was named a top book of 2023 by New York Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, and School Library Journal.

Tender illustrations tell the story of a young child and their grandmother. Despite the fact that they speak two different languages, they connect as they care for a garden together and, in the process, create a deep and lasting bond.
-New York Public Library Best Books for Kids 2023 

A quiet, tender, and profoundly moving celebration of intergenerational love.
- Kirkus Reviews Best Books 2023

A little boy visits his Polish grandmother, Baba, every morning, and although there is a language barrier, they communicate beautifully through the simple acts of sharing food, humming, and gardening. Iridescent art amplifies a heartwarming intergenerational gem.
-School Library Journal Best Books 2023 

I Talk Like a River is the recent recipient of the following awards:

Sankei Children's Book Award 
This award is the oldest children’s literary award in Japan. The Sankei Children's Book Award annually recognizes the preceding year's "most distinguished Japanese children’s literature, picture book for children.”

HUCKEPACK Picture Book Award 
HUCKEPACK focuses on picture books that build a special bridge from the grown-up reader to the child being read to. Huckepacke, piggyback in english, is a metaphor for the reading situation: Grown-ups who carry their children piggyback give them stability and warmth and enable their children to see more of the world surrounding them. 

Wenjin Book Award
A national book award created to promote high quality books among readers encourage reading in China. The 17th annual award is sponsored by the National Library of China and the national library community. 

Premio Andersen Miglior Albo Illustrato and SuperPremio Andersen
The Andersen Prize is one of Italy's most important children's book awards. I Talk Like a River won for best illustrated book and best book overall. The award is chosen boy booksellers, librarians, journalists, and scholars. 

The Silver Slate Pencil (Zilveren Griffel)
One of the most prestigious prizes for Dutch children’s books, I Talk Like a River won in the category “best books for children aged 6-9 years old."  From the jury:

Overwhelming, powerful and unique: these are the qualifications that emerged during the jury deliberations about the book I talk like a river. The jury is impressed by the rich language, imagery in conjunction with the powerful illustrations. The author tells an authentic story with great expressiveness. …The book starts with fragments of texts where the emphasis is on certain letters. It is only later in the book that we discover the meaning of this collection of thoughts. They revolve around the different letters that the main character stumbles over on a daily basis. ... They form poetic phrases and lilting alliterations. But as soon as they want to flow out, they turn out to be rocks that cause the river of words to flow with difficulty. …But the river is also flexible and always looks for a way to keep flowing. The book therefore offers an important lesson not to give up, but to accept yourself as you are. Sydney Smith's evocative illustrations are not only beautiful, but give the story an important dimension. They express how the boy experiences the world.

By Meghan Cox Gurdon
Read the whole list on wsj.com

The chattering, churning, whirling waters of Jordan Scott’s autobiographical picture book “I Talk Like a River” (Holiday House, 40 pages, $18.99) exist both inside and outside its young narrator, a boy who suffers from a debilitating stutter. “At school, I hide in the back of the class. I hope I don’t have to talk,” he tells us. “When my teacher asks me a question, all my classmates turn and look.” In sublime and poignant paintings, Sydney Smith shows the child’s struggle, his misery and shame—and then the glorious, sun-dappled afternoon when his father uses an example from nature to transform the boy’s understanding of himself: “I talk like a river.”

What if Every Time You Tried to Talk, the Words Got Stuck?In a new picture book, “I Talk Like a River,” the Canadian poet Jordan Scott recalls his childhood struggle with stuttering.

By Craig Morgan Teicher

Read the review on nytimes.com
Named one of 2020’s best books by The New York Times

According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, around three million Americans stutter, and 5 percent to 10 percent of children will develop a stutter in their lifetime. As a child, I did, and still what I want to say sometimes feels as if it’s trapped in a bubble I can’t pop. My tongue loops around the stuck word or phrase, attempts alternate routes. I stare at the ceiling, begging patience with my eyes. A stutter, like other differences, can be frightening and painful because it threatens to isolate the stutterer. To a child, for whom social connection is paramount, this can be terrifying.

In “I Talk Like a River,” the Canadian poet Jordan Scott recalls his own childhood struggle with stuttering. His episodic narrative, told in a few straightforward sentences per page, accompanied by gorgeous illustrations by Sydney Smith, is an empathetic conversation-starter for families seeking help for a young — or not so young — person who stutters. Scott looks 8 or 9 in Smith’s renderings; freckled, with an intense, inward-looking gaze.

In the first pages, he stares out a window, contemplating his anxious relationship with words: “I wake up each morning with the sounds of words all around me./P for the pine tree outside my bedroom window./C for the crow in its branches.” But this is no uplifting abecedary. The story follows Scott from shame and fear to a state not of “fluency,” which implies a cure for stuttering, but, as he says in his short afterword, of self-acceptance and integration.

Smith has found a brilliant visual solution to show how stuttering creates a forced kind of, well, social distance. Working in generously applied water-based paints, he depicts people, rooms and nature with appealing warmth and precision, while also using the paint’s capacity to spread, bleed, run and dissolve to figure the ways speech will and won’t flow, and how the threat of being cut off can actually distort what the sufferer sees.

The most moving art accompanies Scott’s admission that “when my teacher asks me a question, all my classmates turn and look.” One illustration shows a soft, gummy vision of the classroom from the last row: the backs of the students’ heads, the brush strokes of their hair, the patterns on their sweaters. This all shifts in a second picture, which is blurred, almost dirty, the students’ indistinct faces turned menacingly toward the viewer, who sits in Scott’s place and seems to be retreating into himself, the light in the room fading.

The story breathes a sigh of relief when the boy’s father takes him to a nearby river, a metaphor and even a role model for how turbulence and eddying are all part of the natural flow. A particularly powerful gatefold showing Scott’s troubled face across two pages opens out into a wide painting of him wading into the sun-speckled river, just as he is wading deliberately into the uneasy territory of his stutter.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Before we know it, two pages later, he is swimming: “When the words around me are hard to say, I think of the proud river, bubbling, churning, whirling and crashing.” The painting on this page has a bit of everything that’s come before: a shaded and shadowy body, bright flecks of bluish white to depict the water bounding against the boy’s swimming strokes; greens, blues, grays and gentle reds, the colors of a challenging and beautiful life.

If I’d had a book like this as a kid, I would have been a lot less afraid to open my mouth. While it won’t cure stuttering itself, “I Talk Like a River” may go a long way toward healing the sense of isolation that is among its most painful effects.

By Jeffrey Canton
Read the full list on globeandmail.com

One of the most powerful books that I’ve read in 2020. Scott takes us into the world of a boy whose stuttering is devastating to him. But on a “bad speech day,” his father takes him to the river where he discovers that the river mirrors how he talks – bubbling, churning, crashing and whirling – and that gives him something to hold on to and use as a lifeline. Scott’s loving and lyrical text is made real through Smith’s illustrations, which shimmer with emotion and make readers feel that they’re truly seeing the world that Scott describes.