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Reviewed by:
  • Pictures from Our Vacation
  • Deborah Stevenson
Perkins, Lynne Rae Pictures from Our Vacation; written and illus. by Lynne Rae Perkins. Greenwillow, 200732p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-085098-1$17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-085097-3$16.99 R* Gr. 2-5

The narrator, her brother, and their parents are taking their vacation on the old family farm, along with the children's grandparents. A long car trip leads to a place filled with memories for the kids' dad but, at least initially, dull disappointment for the narrator ("I asked our dad if on our next vacation, we could go someplace like Disney World"). When a memorial service brings other relatives to the farm, though, life returns to the old place and the girl and her brother settle into a classic family holiday. Perkins takes this conventional story and lifts it into a metanarrative that accessibly discusses the way stories get told and memories get made: our narrator, given a small instant-print camera and a notebook in which to record her vacation impressions, realizes when looking back at an unevocative series of images and jottings that "it's hard to take a picture of a story someone tells, or what it feels like when you're rolling down a hill or falling asleep in a house full of cousins and uncles and aunts." The book is more than up to this difficult task, however, vividly depicting the tedium and random interests ("The second day was almost exactly the same as the first day except that for lunch, we stopped at a place where you could get gravy on your french fries") of a lengthy car trip and the alienness and disappointments of a strange vacation spot. Yet it gives full and feeling credit to the small and lasting joys of such vacations: the inventions of new desserts, the finding of weird bugs, the sound of adult conversation floating up to the bedrooms of the sleep-bound children. Perkins' unprettified line-and-watercolor art is well suited to a realistic vacation story, and she cleverly channels the scrapbook/combinative format in laying out her narrator's imaginings and in sequences of events, with creative overhead views and map formats adding literal as well as philosophical perspective. The correlation of pictures taken to events experienced could elicit some interesting discussion and assignments, but this will also do families across the board a favor by encouraging them to reconceptualize vacations as experiences rather than glossy photo-ops, and all the more memorable for that.

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