WONDERFUL WORLD-BUILDING

light touch for dark subjects

​I was delighted to discover a joyful book on this heart-breaking subject. There are many good things to say about The Forgettery but I’m going to use this analysis as a way of thinking about world-building in a picture book.

​Not that easy, considering one has fewer than 800 words to do it in. But there are visuals, I hear you say, and creating a setting is an illustrator’s job. True, but setting is not just location, it’s also the moral climate at work in a book. It’s the author’s job to convey this. And I think it dictates the story’s tone and therefore, the illustration style. 

Rachel Ip’s Forgettery, “a place where you can find anything you have ever forgotten”, is a cheerful place. 

 Laura Hughes takes this comforting idea and draws a nostalgic world that is part The Magic Faraway Tree (Enid Blyton) and part Swiss family Robinson. The illustrations are lively and stuffed with witty details: a drawerful of footwear from the 60s, a reel to reel tape deck; I chuckled, seeing all the stuff a woman of certain age would know. Great research, Laura.

The world is logically conceived, i.e. the child’s memory store is much smaller than Granny’s, naturally, and it contains “an entire box of forgotten ‘please and thank yous.’” There is a way to enter the Forgettery and a way to exit. (That spiral slide had our child reader longing for a go; her Grand too.)

Ip’s language is lyrical in places: “Moments of delight… fluttering … like butterflies. Paper thin and delicate.”  (I love it when a writer gifts a child-reader poetry.)  And she uses the List method to write Memory Making Advice. Like Martin Waddell's in Rosie's Babies, Ip's words convey honest sentiment (optimism, fun, hope) rather than sentimentality.

The Forgettery by Rachel Ip
Illustrated by Laura Hughes
Published by Egmont, UK, 2021

World-building with words inspires illustration

Hughes’ touch is tender too. We see Granny sitting in a bed wearing an NHS hospital gown under her old green cardie.  Amelia, the child protagonist, is there, comforting her grandmother via a memory book she’s made. So, the main character has learned something and applied it; a prescript in some Writing for Children texts. 

So, what did I learn about picture book writing from The Forgettery? 

• Even a whimsical world needs the scaffold of a well-thought out concept. 
• A credible setting (physical and emotional) built with the right words and tone, enables the illustrator’s imagination to take off.

---

Dementia is a subject I wrote about here, back in 2018.  I’m addressing it in my picture book writing too, inspired by this remark from my dearly demented, now departed mother.  If my NYP* pb, working title “Finding Nan’s Treasures”, should ever appear in print, please note it was in no way influenced by the above.  Writers explore what's bothering them and discover there are a limited number of ways to  develop a theme. 
*Not yet published. Has a nice optimistic tone, don't you think?

'The Forgettery' by Rachel Ip, illustrated by Laura Hughes. Images used with permission.