The back story about this new picture book is mentioned in the author's note that follows the main text, but author Cathy Stefan Ogren discussed it further in this terrific interview about story origins and the deep connection to her friends and family, HERE. Beth Anderson shared her website platform with Cathy for her insights into finding and writing the HEART of this wonderful new fiction picture book. Other comments, reviews, and insights about Cathy and this book can be read in sites from her blog tour, with links offered HERE. My reactions to this delightful new story, born from real experiences, follow.
SLEEPING BEAR PRESS, 2024
THE LITTLE RED CHAIR is written by Cathy Stefanec Ogren and illustrated by Alexandra Thompson. I found this story delightful because the text achieves such a prefect balance of personification of the little upholstered chair without fully anthropomorphizing it. It doesn't speak or dance or have agency, at least none that can be witnessed in the "real" world in which it exists. Readers, though, gain access to its inner wishes, dreams, and worries. The author gives the chair a voice, including the repetitive "Squeakity-squee" of its wheels. Just as with human language, context and inflection can make the same 'words" or "Squeakily-Squees" carry entirely different emotional value, and that is true as the chair reveals its reactions throughout. The illustrations manage to achieve a similar delicate balance, using angles, perspectives, and relationships in space to underscore those emotional twists and turns. Brilliantly and tenderly done.
(For anyone exploring personification in writing, adults or teachers leading students, this is superb mentor text.)
With that note aside, here's my look at the story itself.
The cover indicates this story's opening, setting a bedraggled, frayed little upholstered chair in a drab store window on a dreary day. What hope could there be for a better life, unless that little girl has a huge heart. She does. Her insistence on taking it home is conveyed with minimal text and glowing expressions. The chair and girl begin a bond built by time, shared experiences, and mutual need. But, as with many things in young lives, the girl, Mia, grows up but the chair does not. Until one day Mia leaves for college, but she continues to hold the little red chair close, even though it's once renewed and spruced up condition has become worn and drab.
Readers will fear (at least THIS reader feared) that the household would discard the chair, leaving it to find a new family. That would not necessarily be an unhappy ending, and makes a fine circle story. The good/bad news is that chair survives a down-sizing move, but only to the new residence's attic. There, again, racers can access the inner feelings of the chair throughout seasons and passing time, until...
No spoilers, but THIS circle story is even more gratifying in the best ways. Though this is a relatively simple story and one told with familiar White characters, the concept of a generational circle story about a beloved childhood companion is universal in every sense, with an emotional arc that will resonate around the world. The muted but expressive illustrations and details set it in very specific conditions that enrich the account, but the basics invite multiple retellings among readers, inserting their own tales of discovery, recovery, connection, growth, and reconnection over time. As mentioned above, the text and illustrations offer outstanding mentor opportunities for others to pursue personal, "small moments" stories from their own lives, even ones not spanning a lifetime of change.
I can't close these notes without mentioning the back matter, in which the author reveals the full story from her own life that inspired this book, as well as a very informative note about small-scale furnishings, appliances, and vehicles that were used by traveling salesmen to provide actual examples of their inventory without lugging full-sized objects across country. These were called "Salesman's Samples", and you may have seen a few if you watch PBS ANTIQUES ROAD SHOW or other programs about such stores and objects.
With that in mind, I felt a special appeal from the front and back endpapers, which appear as a closeup of the faded, frayed, tufted surface from THE LITTLE RED CHAIR at the start and after it shared its life with Mia and her family. The details are so well rendered that I longed to reach out and smooth the surface, to reassure the chair that love is never lost, that something better was waiting. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did, and consider revealing some of your own or family stories with young readers when you share this book with them.
