I’m slipping in an oldie but goody book review of a book by David Weisner, the winner of this year’s Caldecott Medal (
Flotsam published 2006). You really can’t lose when picking up any of his books. I waxed perhaps a bit too academic and perhaps a bit too long in this particular review, but there’s much to be said about June 29, 1999.
June 29, 1999 by David Weisner (hardcover, 1992).
What if giant vegetables fell from the sky? In Weisner’s June 29, 1999, this “what if?” becomes reality. Holly, the third-grade protagonist, may be small in stature, but she’s got a huge imagination. For her school science project, Holly launches vegetable seedlings in a balloon-basket contraption into the sky to investigate the affects of the extra-terrestrial atmosphere on plant growth and development.
Both front and back covers depict Holly’s plausibly engineered contraptions floating upwards into the clouds, thus creating a science-fiction ethos and enticing viewers to move beyond the cover to uncover the mystery of events occurring inside June 29, 1999. The inside layout is equally image driven—lush photo-realistic watercolor illustrations in rectangular frames splash over the majority of the two page spreads with minimal black text on white background appearing only on the left column of the verso. The story’s setting runs chronologically from the May 11, 1999 inception with the seedling launch until the June 29, 1999 surprise ending and geographically from US city to US city invoking realistic frameworks that enhance the story’s credibility even if young readers don’t yet fully understand time and geography. The deadpan third-person reporting of events accompanying ludicrous illustrations exemplifies picture book irony and creates cognitive dissonance between readers’ previously defined realm of possibilities and the reality defined by the narrative world.
Words and pictures work in symbiosis to create cognitive dissonance—the minimal, ordinary text extends in meaning through its juxtaposition beside maximized, extraordinary pictures. For example, the simple statement, “All over the country, the skies fill with vegetables” adjoins an intricate illustration showing gargantuan heads of lettuce cascading down on telephone lines and a dwarfed roadside diner. The text omits mention of a specific vegetable, landing locale, and any incongruities of size between the two. Such continuous play with semiotic codes (linguistic, size, position, frame, etc.) results in a fill-in-the-gaps-for-yourself picture book that encourages creating one’s own meaning.
The photo-realistic style of the watercolor illustrations—engendered through sagacious utilization of frame, line, shadow, perspective, and color—further encourages belief in the fantastic events. Rectangular frames are redolent of photographs, precise line differentiates pictorial entities, and shadows imbue the vegetables with dimensionality (e.g., delineating individual leafs on the heads of lettuce, bumps on the cucumbers, and rings on the turnips). Aerial perspective, developed by painting distant objects with less focus and lighter and duller hues as well as by placing them higher on the page, forges a depth analogous to reality. Frequent use of sundry hues of blues and greens further connects the fantastic to the natural world.
Fantastic (e.g., giant vegetables, aliens), natural (e.g., landscapes, seascapes), and scientific (e.g., portrait of Einstein, books on photosynthesis and Madame Curie, a wall chart of the periodic elements, bottles) images intermingle creating a visual smorgasbord that demands altered perception. As “Artichokes advance on Anchorage,” looming large over a tiny airplane, minuscule humans, and background mountains, onlookers’ perceptions of the possible broaden.
June 29, 1999 forces consideration of what children need in their literature—can adults accept that children need more than comfort, closure, and reassurance in their literature? Weisner surmounts human discomfort with the unfamiliar by altering reality within the bounds of “normalcy”—he defamiliarizes ordinary vegetables within recognizable earthly settings (a delightful dissonance for children and an acceptable level for adult purchasers). The majority of the book implies that the vegetables are indeed a consequence (following firmly established principles of cause and effect) of Holly’s science project. However, narrative tension rises mid-book when Holly sees a television news report that, “arugula covers Ashtabula”. While Holly’s face fills with consternation because arugula was not part of her experiment, an article in the Star magazine lying next to her foreshadows a different possibility: well-dressed space aliens.
In the final two illustrations, the cause of the vegetables’ appearance is evinced to be galactic alien tourists passing over earth who accidentally jettisoned their entire food supply of colossal vegetables. Exposure to page-after-page of reality replete with giant vegetables has prepared readers to consider this “alien” possibility. The aliens’ physical appearance (resembling nothing more than giant octopi in chef hats and dinner jackets) and their role as galactic tourists fully satirizes human fear of the unfamiliar. In contrast to the aliens-out-to-destroy-the-earth theme, this alien encounter with the unfamiliar has been a boon to earth’s economy; on earth, “vegetables have become big business”. The last page proffers a final ironic twist; as the perplexed aliens watch their supper float toward earth, tiny vegetables float towards their ship. Humorously, while Holly’s science project may have failed in its original intent to enhance vegetable growth by altering their environment, it succeeded in enhancing intergalactic sharing.
Overall, the gargantuan vegetables provide a narrative focus that invites thinking about nature, technology, and possibility. In this work—part science, part fiction, part fantasy (depending on how narrowly one interprets what is plausible)—Weisner’s genius lies in his ability to challenge young minds to explore their worlds while simultaneously winning adult acquiescence to a certain degree of exposure to the unfamiliar by including humorous and distracting layers of familiarity (e.g., intertextual elements such as Potatoland’s failed attempt to replicate Mt. Rushmore, the Big Rutabaga replacing the Big Apple).
Throughout the book, characters react to the unknown in various ways. Holly’s teacher snickers and rejects her experiment as implausible, the hiker faints when he encounters giant turnips, and many people rope the red peppers to wrestle them to the ground. Yet, Weisner provides more options—beyond disbelief, fear, and domination—for reacting to the unfamiliar. For instance, the rabbits race toward their newfound sustenance in sheer delight, the farmer rejoices at the augmented crop yield, and Holly (notably a budding female scientist) continues to wonder about her world despite not completely understanding the giant veggies’ ontology.
Weisner’s final illustration of Holly portrays her seated on a giant broccoli piece with her face turned upward to the sky. Children need more than comfort and personal security in their lives as they grow; they also need to learn to question the way things are and the way they should be as they explore life’s possibilities. The “why and what if” questions of this book engender part of its appeal as these questions resonate with all young souls whose whole job it is to learn about their world and their place in it. June 29, 1999 forces speculation about the realities that are on its pages. Perhaps giant vegetables may fall again on September 26, 2006…Weisner’s readers will be ready if they do.
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