The Garden of Abdul Gasazi: What are you doing with Alan's hat?

The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, by Chris Van Allsburg
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979
Caldecott Honor Medal, 1980

Click on the cover to listen to the way we read The Garden of Abdul Gasazi


The Garden of Abdul Gasazi was the first book published by Chris Van Allsburg (author of Jumanji and The Polar Express, among many other books). It is an eerie adventure about responsibility, guilt, magic and reality, that attracted my son immediately and both his parents more gradually but just as intensely.

The Story
One day, little Alan Mitz's neighbour, Miss Hester, entrusts him with a mission: to look after her horribly behaved dog for the day and give him his afternoon walk. Alan takes his job very seriously and spends all morning heroically making sure Fritz doesn't bite the furniture. He wins the battle and finally they both fall asleep, exhausted. Before dropping off, he makes well sure he has his hat, Fritz´s favourite thing to chew, safely tucked under his shirt.

An hour later, Fritz wakes Alan up with a bite on the nose, which the boy takes as an indication that the dog is ready for his afternoon walk. The dog barges ahead, dragging Alan behind him. Eventually they come to a doorway with a sign: ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY NO DOGS ALLOWED IN THIS GARDEN, signed ABDUL GASAZI, RETIRED MAGICIAN. Alan tries to walk on but the dog frees itself from his leash and runs inside. Alan follows Fritz deeper and deeper into the garden, then loses sight, and eventually comes to a clearing and sees the rather impressive house of the retired magician.

Nervous, he walks up to the door and before he has time to press the bell, Gasazi opens the door, lets him in and says 'Certainly, you may have your little Fritzie', and then leads him outside, to a gathering of ducks. One of the ducks comes forward. 'There's your Fritz', says Gasazi. Take your dear bird and please don't come again'.

Alan is shocked and confused, but when the duck tries to bite his hand, he's reassured that it must be Fritz. He starts walking home, wondering how he's going to explain things to Miss Hester, with Gasazi's laugh ringing in his ears, when a gust of wind blows his hat away and the duck flies after it.... and keeps flying and flying until it diseappers into the distance.

Poor Alan keeps walking and is soon at Miss Hester's door. He bravely knocks on the door and blurts out his story as soon as it opens, only to see Fritz racing out of the house, 'dog food on his nose'. He then feels silly for having been so gullible and promises himself he'll never be fooled like that again.

When he's gone, Fritz goes to Miss Hester and drops Alan's hat at her feet. "Why you bad dog, What are you doing with Alan's hat?", she says.

The Illustrations
Chris Van Allsburg's painstakingly, almost obsessively, detailed grey pencil illustrations in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi provide a three dimensional depth to an already delightfully atmospheric text.

Here's Alan on the sofa and Fritz under the sofa, sleeping after an exhausting morning of running about:

Check out the wallpaper and the carpet.
Allsburg dooesn't half love a pattern!

Here's Alan falling and Fritz running ahead 'barking with laughter':

It's difficult to appreciate on the screen and at this resolution, but the
grass is absolutely amazing. I love the rabbit to the right.

Here's Abdul Gasazi opening the door:

I don't know about you but I can almost touch that stone and feel it.

This is my favourite. Such fantastic character definition:

How many patterns can you spot? 

And here's Alan with Gasazi and Fritz the duckie:

Nice pattern on Gasazi's dressing gown too

These illustrations are really worth seeing on paper (Houghton Mifflin kindly makes sure it's superb quality paper, too).

The illustrations are set out classically, with one page for text and the other for illustration. The text is set inside a frame (patterned of course!):

The illustrations have so much detail, there is a lot to look at. There are paintings inside the illustrations (see the first illustration above, on top of the sofa). The white rabbit theme is present not only in the illustration where the rabbit is watching the scene where Alan is falling down the steps, but also in the illustration where Gasazi's opening the door, where we see two white stone-carved rabbits on the frame of the door (unfortunately they are cut off in the image above). But the most extraordinary detail in these illustrations is in the rendering of the textures of everything: the stone, the grass, the trees, the sky, the cloth, the flowers, the glass, the trunks of the trees.

One of the things that strikes me most about the illustrations in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi is the role of the sky in the portrayal of the passing of time. It's almost like watching clouds on one of those days where they move quickly through the sky. As the initially bright and sunny day progresses, the sky becomes darker, first because of a turn in the weather, and then because it's getting dark.

My son was attracted to The Garden of Abdul Gasazi from the very beginning (he was slightly over two when we got it). I think one of the reasons is that these illustrations really do seem like scenes you could walk right in to. I don't know what it is, but there is something incredibly solid about the stone, something incredibly soft about his sofa cushions. I didn't know this at the time, but perhaps Chris Van Allsburg's original training as a sculptor explains something about how he "does" volume. It really is remarkable.

Reading The Garden of Abdul Gasazi out loud

The first thing that struck me about this book was how much text it had for a picture book. My immediate reaction was to think the text should have been shorter, but actually the more I read it, the less I agree (see the section below on "What we like about The Garden of Abdul Gasazi" for more on this point). It's nice to read slightly longer things out loud (and kids, even very young ones, like it too).

So it's a longer, quiet read, sort of book. Reading it aloud is also different, a bit more like reading a short story. It has no rhyme, no repetition, no classic read-aloud props and yet, it works wonderfully well. In this book, I think one of the things about the text that holds the listener's attention is the effectively sparse use of pieces of dialogue that work as anchors to hang on to. This, combined with the terriffically atmospheric illustrations (it may have more text than your average picture book, but the illustrations are certainly at least half of it), is able to capture the attention of any kid who's in the mood for a mysterious adventure.

Whenever we read it, my son squeals with delight when Fritz bites Alan's nose, expresses concern when the dog runs off into the forbidden garden, giggles at the idea of a dog "barking with laughter" and gives it a try himself, goes all quiet when Alan is searching for Fritz, shares Alan's awe at Gasazi's house, goes quiet again when Gasazi appears, is really fascinated at the thought that Fritz might have become a duck, shouts out No! when the duck-Fritz flies off with Alan's hat and then goes quiet again until the end, when he shares Miss Hester's "Bad dog!".

What we like about The Garden of Abdul Gasazi

First, it has a wonderful name. The name Abdul Gasazi enters your mind and never leaves.

I like that it has quite a lot of text. I think that the current trend in picture books to 'keep it under five hundred words' has no real reason for being. There are some absolutely wonderful picture books with less than 500 words, and it takes great talent to write them, but there's nothing wrong with a few more words -and it takes no less talent to write them-. One of the things that this book does so well -develop its characters- might have required those extra words. And good job Chris Van Allsburg was allowed to use them.

I also really like how it touches on the feeling of responsibility and fear of failing at a grown up job (Alan's parents are missing in the story) and how, right up until the end -when we are told that Alan promised himself he'd never be fooled like that again and told himself he was too old to believe in magic-, it plays with the possibility of the entire story being either a nightmare or even perhaps a fib that Alan makes up to cover up for the fact that he dropped off and Fritz wandered off.

It really grew on me, this one.

P.S. This is actually the only Chris Van Allsburg we have read. I've just discovered that apparently Fritz, the little doggie here, is mysteriously hidden in all his books. Must look out for him!

P.P.S. Chris Van Allsburg's website is pretty cool too.

(c) of all the illustrations in this post, Chris Van Allsburg, 1979.

The Boy in the Garden: "How charming", Mr. Ozu said.

The Boy in the Garden, written and illustrated by Allen Say.
Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2010



Click on the cover to listen how we read The Boy in the Garden by Allen Say. 


The Boy in the Garden is one of my son's absolute favourite books. He went through a phase, lasting around two solid months, when he had to have it every single night. He's grown out of that now, but it still remains one of his favourites. Although in terms of reading age, it's probably best suited to children from around 4 up to 8 or so, there's something about it that attracted my son's attention -and kept it!- from the age of approximately 22 months. I think it manages to convey a sense of mystery beyond the words and the pictures, and to provide an immersion into a child's retreat away from an adult world and code that can sometimes seem puzzling, even mean. There is perhaps something about this retreat into a private mental life, portrayed here as ultimately positive, even liberating, that seems to resonate even with kids as young as that.
We like it!

The Story
This story takes as its background (and includes as a preface -also read in our recording, even though we don't include it every time we read the book) the traditional Japanese tale of The Grateful Crane, where a crane repays a man who rescues it from a trap by turning into a woman and marrying him, and then withdraws the repayment when the man breaks his vow not to look while she is weaving beautiful cloth for them to sell and survive, turning back into a crane and flying away. In The Boy in the Garden The Grateful Crane is presented as "The story that Mama read to Jiro".

The Boy in the Garden itself is the story of Jiro and his father paying a New Year's visit to one Mr. Ozu, whose garden is very famous and whose house is full of treasures, Jiro is warned, in a "don't touch" fashion.

After saying hello and accepting Mr. Ozu's New Year's gift it very soon becomes clear that this is all an adults' affair and Jiro wonders off, eventually into the garden, where he is drawn to a crane standing in the distance. He slowly creeps up to it, holding his breath, listening to the stones crunching under his feet, and is about to reach out when his father abruptly interrupts his solitary adventure with loud laughter from the house, pointing out that it's only a statue. Mr. Ozu joins in the laughter. "How charming", he says.

Embarrased, Jiro runs off and retreats into what initially seems like a daydream and ends up as an actual dream involving the crane woman of his Mama's story, a kimono just his size, him acting "just like Papa" and going out to search for firewood and him promising not to peek when the woman announces she's going to do some weaving. Stop! he shouts, until he hears a door opening, then voices and eventually his father and Mr. Ozu saying he's had a bad dream. "A charming boy", Mr. Ozu laughs again. The father chuckles too.

When they are leaving the garden, Jiro can't take his eyes away from the crane statue, and his father makes an attempt at an apology, now that no other adults are about: "You know, son, for a moment that crane looked real". But Jiro answers: "It's just a statue, Papa".

The last scene shows a crane flying in the light of the moon above Mr. Ozu's garden, with Jiro, we are told, fast asleep in his own bed.

The Illustrations
(Apologies for the appalling photographs, but there are practically none to be found online and all I could do was take snaps with my phone. I will eventually do my best to put this right.)

There is something about Caldecott Medalist Allen Say's pencil and watercolour illustrations in The Boy in the Garden that draws you in quietly but surely.

The first time I saw them I wasn't particularly taken by them. Yes, technically they are very good, exquisitely executed and rather sophisticated, but not really my style. However, reading the book to my son and watching what caught his attention it struck me that there was something rather special about the illustrations.

Say makes Jiro and his perspective lead the illustrations. It's almost like watching a warped perspective, which just happens to be perfectly straight. We are shown the story through the child's mind, and get to feel the excitement, the sense of divide between adult and child code and language, and ultimately, the unique combination of fear and thrill, disappointment and excitement  of a child learning about the world.

The technique is impeccable and the result is complex.

Here are a few of our favourite illustrations of The Boy in the Garden:

Jiro peeping out at the crane in the distance

Jiro about to touch the crane, with his father and Mr. Ozu laughing in the distance

Jiro embarrassed

Jiro finds the woodcutter's cottage

Aren't you supposed to be lost in the snowstorm?

No, I'll never peek. Never!

By the time the moon rose above the garden of Mr. Ozu,
Jiro was fast asleep in his own bed.

Reading it Aloud

As I have said at the start, this book is probably best suited to the 4-8 age group (give or take). However, this book has what I call the "early interest factor". Some books are enjoyable from a much younger age than their official target audience. What younger children enjoy about it will almost certainly be very different from what older children who understand all the story and all the nuances will get out of it, but that does not mean they will not enjoy it (in my son's case, it's true love!). And its fascinating to watch how what they enjoy about it gradually shifts as their understanding of the actual story increases.

The Boy in the Garden is a gentle book to read aloud, with just the right dose of tension and suspense, perfect for bedtime.

I'm talking here of reading it to a two year old (obviously reading it to an older kid will be rather different). For a two year old then, the "high points" of the book read aloud are:

-The laughter of the father interrupting Jiro's private expedition to touch the crane:
Ha, ha, ha!, bursts of laughter rang out.

-The moment when Jiro spots a small cottage:
"It's the woodcutter's house! he said excitedly. And he forgot to close the door". (I think this is one of my son's favourite parts),

-The rustling sound outside the cottage and finding out it's not a woodcutter, but "a tall woman":
Welcome, Jiro-san", she said and bowed. 
The boy stared. How did you know my name? 

 -Jiro going off to gather firewood, looking back and waving to the woman:
"I'm like Papa going to work in the morning, he thought. I'm the woodcutter.". 

-Where Jiro promises not to peek:
No, I'll never peek. Never! But don't go! 


-And my son always liked, and now repeats, Mr Ozu's comment when Jiro wakes  up:
"A charming boy, Mr. Ozu laughed. Naps in the teahouse like a cat.
Like a cat! says my son.  

The illustrations provide a lot of nice detail to point to and talk about too. It's a very enjoyable book to share.

More on Allen Say
Allen Say won the Caldecott Medal in 1994 for Grandfather's Journey. We haven't read that one. Must get it.

Read a nice interview with Allen Say here:

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/11/portland_author_and_artist_all.html

(c) of all the illustrations in this post: Allen Say, 2010