Title: Bee & Bird
Author/Illustrator: Craig Frazier
Genre: Wordless Picture Book
Theme(s): Animals, Outdoors
Brief Book Summary: This book tells the story of a bee that lands on a birds back and the journey that they take as the bird flies around. The bright close up illustrations leave the reader guessing what will they are looking at and where the bird will land next. When the bird does land, it the book carefully portrays the vast world around both bee and bird.
Professional Recommendation/Review #1:
Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz (Children's Literature)
No words are needed to tell the story of a bee s adventures with a bright-eyed red bird across double pages. After the bee lands on the bird s head, the tree where the bird sits is loaded onto a truck. From there, the bird flies to a boldly patterned black and white cow; then off over water, bee still perched on his head. Next seen against a slanted white shape, the bird, we realize on the next double page, is on a sailboat, which appears small above a vast expanse of water. It is a toy boat, we see, as it is lifted out of the water and placed in the bicycle basket of a young man. As the bird flies off the boat, the bee flies away to her hive. The bird ends atop the hive. The paper jacket pictures the bee circling for a landing on the bird s head; on the cover the mission is accomplished. Throughout the book there are constant shifts in point of view of the characters, zooms in and out, with sharp geometric design structure. After a remarkable double-page close-up of what turns out to be the hive with just a bit of the black entrance, the following pages offer a zoom-out views, fine examples of intense graphics to carry the narrative content. Bees fly across the front end papers, while bird silhouettes occupy the end papers.
Professional Recommendation/Review #2:
Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly)
Frazier's (Lots of Dots) crisp graphic sense and supersaturated fields of red, yellow, green, and light blue drive this wordless picture book. Its focus is the play of view and perspective, using the striped, gossamer-winged Bee and red Bird as subjects. The first spread shows columns of yellow and black what can they be? and the next pulls back enough to reveal Bee viewed from above, perched on the gigantic head of Bird; from Bee's point of view, Bird's head is the size of a planet. This book is first cousin to Istvan Banyai's Zoom: it also plays with the idea that something that appears very large (Bird and Bee aboard a sailboat, on what looks like an endless span of stylized waves) turns out to be quite small (it's a toy boat held in the hand of a boy). Here, though, the action takes place on a single stage; Bird and Bee are always there, and the scenery against which they appear is always real. The strong primary colors vibrate against each other, and the patterns have the unattractive pull of a billboard.
Response to Two Professional Reviews: Both book reviews discuss the close up images that are unclear at first, but then understood when the scope zooms out. They talk about the vibrant colors and how they intensify the story.
Evaluation of Literary Elements: This book works a lot with juxtaposition and perspective because of the way the pictures present themselves in a zoomed in manner, and slowly pull out to reveal the scene. Frazier plays with color and shape a lot. The colors are bright and vivid while the shapes are sharp and the surrounding blank space emphasizes the topic of vastness.
Consideration of Instructional Application: This book is great for young children learning to read or write. Before or while they learn to read, children can “read” their own story that goes along with the pictures. Early writers can write a story based off of the pictures. Also, both the early readers and early writers can make their own wordless stories.