I TALK LIKE A RIVER: DO. NOT. MISS. THIS. PICTURE BOOK

 

NEAL PORTER BOOKS, 2020

Please, do three things for me before reading further:

Take time to really LOOK at this cover.       

                                         Seriously, just LOOK at THAT cover!

Recall a time, any time, when you experienced a river.

Take time to relive that experience with all five senses.

I TALK LIKE A RIVER is written by Jordan Scott and illustrated by Sydney Smith. If you took time to experience the cover as I asked above, you will engage with this book as fully as intended. If not, or if you somehow have never experienced a river, this book just might provide a vicarious experience that could change your life. 

Either way, PLEASE read this book.

The narrator's first person voice finds him awaking to a new day amid glorious, natural surroundings: pine trees, crows, and fading moonlight. The soft-edged images in these first pages and throughout this story shift from focused to fuzzy, from slices to boxes to wholistic images, but always returning to the boy's eyes, revealing his inner emotions and thoughts. 

Within a few page turns of the opening, readers hear and feel his daily struggle with fluency when simply voicing his inner, fluent thoughts. Certain sounds, like the p-p-p-pine, take root in his mouth, the c-c-c-crow chokes in the back of his throat, and the m-m-m-moon "dusts my lips with a magic that makes me only mumble".

It's clear from specific scenes portrayed that the boy faces each and every day fully aware of the "bad speech day" that may lurking around the corner. He (and the reader) remain cautious, alert, on guard for coming requirements to speak. As a reader, I felt my own shoulders and throat tighten in anticipation of what would actually presents itself.

Illustration shifts from crisp to blur eventually distort images of classmates and teacher staring, magnify his embarrassment about the facial distortions he feels and others see, of the ominous threat he perceives from being called on to speak. On this particular day, the task is to speak about his favorite place. I felt desperately empathetic to his sense that a classroom was the extreme opposite of his favorite place to be.

Interior double spread, opens to double-wide fold-out.

This boy's salvation is a father who not only rescues him from a "bad speech day", but also reconnects his troubled son with a source of strength and comfort. Together, they ride to the river, they walk and watch and wander, before sitting quietly at water's edge, in silence.The father voices an analogy for his son. Look at this struggling boy sitting with the glow and warmth of sun on his shoulders. Imagine his father's deep, calm voice at his side. 

"See that water? That's how you speak."

The  boy watches, hears, senses the urgency of movement- flowing smoothly, then choking, churning, tumbling. Always moving on, feeling the ways the current will carry the water forward, water will eventually achieve a smooth surface. 

I was tempted to include an image of the fold-out scene from above, but you really must see it for yourself. Feel it. Believe it. Know that within us is a force as powerful as the water, always seeking a place of calm and fluency. What happens next in this book is equally powerful, realistic, and comforting to the boy and to the reader.

Most of us take oral fluency for granted, in ourselves and in others. In reality, recent statistics indicate that those who deal with stuttering/stammering develop in preschool and early years including about 3% of childhood population (data from US population, which appears to be similar in global studies).There are too few picture books dealing with this common challenge, though some do exist (HERE). The ones I've read might prove helpful for dysfluent kids, for Speech/Language Pathologists, and even for classmates and teachers.

This particular book, though, offers something that extends far beyond the specific subject matter. Far beyond the deep and supportive  significant insight it provides through the eyes of a dysfluent speaker, even beyond the soothing power of connecting with nature and the strength of a loving and supportive parent. This remarkable picture book allows all readers to recognize the "dysfluencies" in our own lives, not just in oral language. It holds out hope for adults and children to learn to center ourselves, to become one with the things that matter to us, to trust that the current of our lives will return us to calm, even on our own "bad speech days", whatever those may be.

No anchors in time on this post. Those will resume periodically, but for now, feel the timelessness of this story from my review, and then read it for yourself. There are times in life when the focus on outside forces should simply be ignored.