Book review: Ode to the River
Author and illustrator: Emily House
Includes fact boxes by Dr Liz Day
Publisher: Imagnary House
This simple rhyming book is adorable, entertaining and educational.
It also has the added bonus of flaps that uncover facts and children love flaps in books.
The main character in this book is the river. Its story is told in a poem that is split across the pages of the book.
The poem describes the river’s journey from the mountains, where it is born as a spring and follows as it becomes a stream, a rapid, a waterfall, a marsh, while it carves canyons and fills canals.
Along the way curious aquatic animal characters follow its path, stopping every few pages to ask, “But where is it going?”
The book’s poetry is simple but artful. Writing a good rhyme is not easy and I’ve found many clumsy rhymes in children’s books I’ve reviewed over the years, but the poetry in Ode to the River is graceful. Here is an example: “Gliding through grasses, past forests and fields … It feeds and protects, it soothes and it heals. Onwards it pushes and onward it goes. But where is it going? Nobody knows.”
Every few pages there is a flap that reveals a panel packed with river-related facts, which were compiled by river expert Dr Liz Day.
Author and artist Emily House has illustrated and designed many books, but this is the fourth book that she has both written and illustrated. Her previous titles, Earth Takes a Break, Bonbon and Blanket and Treemergency!, have been translated and published internationally. She lives in Cape Town and is the regional advisor of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
Imagnary House is a small independent South African publisher that focuses on children’s and young adult’s books. It prints a small number of new books a year in a niche that puts “imagination before morals”.
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