Blown Away

Kelly L. Green is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual’s
Children’s Literature edition.

The winds of autumn are strong—so strong that they blow the hats and
scarves right off the children of Mistaken Road on their way to school,
and carry Molly Melinda away. That night, the children discover there is
an agate moon and the wind is blowing just right, so they go to visit a
giant with a paper castle kite to ask him for a ride. They climb on, but
he sneezes and loses the string! When they fly to where the wind blows,
however, they find Molly Melinda and negotiate their way home.

Julie Lawson’s latest picture book is complemented by Kathryn
Naylor’s beautiful, delicately colored, watercolor drawings, that
truly suggest the movement of the wind. The design of the book is tied
into the book’s windy metaphor—even the typeface looks wind-blown.
Alas, lovely pictures, coherent design, and occasional bursts of
beautifully poetic language (Lawson’s forte) cannot disguise the lack
of a story.

Neither realistic story nor psychologically significant fairy tale,
Blown Away appears to be an attempt to create a simple but captivating
fantasy book, in the manner of Tim Wynne-Jones’s Zoom books, or the
picture books of Marie-Louise Gay. It fails, however, in that Lawson’s
fantasy does not captivate. There is no real tension or anticipation.
Fairy-tale elements, like the giant and his castle kite, seem thrown in
for effect rather than for any real purpose. Even the language seems to
be manipulative rather than meaningful, as in the choice of “Mistaken
Road” for the street the children live on. If there is some deep or
hidden meaning there, I missed it, and so did the children I read the
book to. Simply not up to Lawson’s usual standards, Blown Away is not
a first-choice purchase.