The Promise by Nicola Davies (review)

A young girl lives in a city that is crumbling, and she’s forced to resort to thievery to find food to eat and money to live on. One evening as she snatches the bag of an older woman, she’s caught; the woman demands that in exchange for the bag, the girl must plant whatever is in it. The girls concedes and when she discovers that the bag contains acorns, she becomes a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading beauty and greenery throughout her city, and later throughout the world, only to pass the torch on at the story’s close to a new young pickpocket. The striking mixed-media illustrations complement the text nicely: Carlin’s work echoes Sweet’s in Bryant’s A Splash of Red (BCCB 1/13) in its use of interesting perspective, sketchy details layered on top of backgrounds, and hand-lettering throughout to evoke a child’s-eye view of the world. The drab grays, navies, and tans of the early city give way to rich greens and reds as the seeds burst into bloom, and the hazy charcoal backgrounds increase the dreamlike sense of the tale. Though the ideas of paying it forward and rejuvenating urban space are well intended, the allegory is unfortunately heavy-handed in its melodrama (“Nothing grew. Everything was broken. No one ever smiled”), and the text ends up preachy in its strongly purposive themes of patience, generosity, and eco-mindedness. Still, the book’s lyricism does mean it’s lovely when read aloud, making this a possible choice as a green-themed and sensitive bedtime story.