Out of the Blue
Written by Rebecca Bach-Lauritsen
Illustrated by Anna Margrethe Kjærgaard
Translated by Michael Favala Goldman
Enchanted Lion, 2024, 84 pp (unpaged)
ISBN: 978-1592704019

In this picturebook translated from Danish, a young boy follows the same routine day after day to create a well-organized predictable life. The book follows him through his daily routine that never varies as he greets the cactus on his bedside table and does his chores in the house and garden before bidding the cactus goodnight. As the only inhabitant of the house, nothing interferes with his daily routines. One night, he dreams of falling into a pile of fur and wakes to find his cactus tipped over. When he researches the footprints that disrupt the straight rows of his garden, he identifies the culprit and goes in search of the bear that must be hiding in his house. The bear under his table turns out to be playful and together they romp around the house, playing games until the once-orderly house becomes a scene of joyful chaos. Exhausted, they tumble into bed for a well-deserved rest as the best of friends.

The sparse text frequently uses sounds to convey the boy’s feelings and routines, for example, “Dum-de-dum” when the boy is ironing his shirt, and so begs to be read aloud. The visual nature of the book is reflected in the arrangements of words on the page in poetic lines. The book ends with,

Suddenly, there it was.
Just like that.
Out of the blue.

But at first it wasn’t there.

The illustrations are in pencil and charcoal with blue colored pen to highlight the orderly lines of the floor that gradually loosen once the bear appears. Blue also plays a subtle role in indicating the boy’s feelings as his cheeks gradually develop spots of blue in colored pencil to reflect his increasing loneliness and boredom. After the bear appears in his life, his cheeks become pink and rosy and even the cactus blooms with delicate flowers. The illustrations have an old-fashioned feel that matches the mood of the book with an emphasis on the boy’s inner life and feelings.

The use of sounds on many pages instead of a narrative opens the book to multiple interpretations. There are many stories that readers might imagine due to the ambiguity in both the words and the visual images. Early in the book, the boy has a framed picture on his wall that includes a bear, who later disappears from the picture–so is the bear an imaginary friend or real? The boy has a blue state of mind but is that depression or loneliness or something else? Parents never appear in the book, but their absence is not significant. The book is about a “feeling” and the importance of embracing change that comes “out of the blue,” rather than an action-oriented adventure. This is a book that invites readers to revisit over and over, and each time uncover new possibilities. In fact, the book itself has a strong message of being open to possibility in our lives, inviting readers to linger in the visual images and sounds in new transactions of meaning-making each time they return to the book. Author Rebecca Bach-Lauritsen and illustrator Anna Margrethe Kjærgaard spoke at the Tucson Festival of Books in March 2024 and indicated that they went through a long process of collaboration between the two of them before they pulled together text and image into this final picturebook version.

Given this range of themes and ambiguity, Out of the Blue could be paired with a variety of texts. The theme of loneliness could be explored by pairing it with Alone Like Me by Rebecca Evans (2022) about a girl who moves to a large city in China where she is unable to attend school and so has no friends. The Only Child, a visual narrative from China by Guojing (2015), moves in and out of fantasy as a lonely child sets off to visit her grandmother. The theme of a bear appearing in a child’s life can be explored through Bear Island by Matthew Cordell (2021) in which a girl dealing with grief and loss visits an island and finds healing by interacting with a bear, which may or may not be real. Another interesting pairing is Coffee, Rabbit, Snowdrop, Lost by Betina Kirkjær and Anna Margrethe Kjæjaard (2021) about the loving relationship of a boy and his grandfather who is gradually losing his memory. This Danish translation also uses sparse and ambiguous text.

The author Rebecca Bach-Lauritsen is a bestselling Danish writer from Copenhagen who has won many awards and has had her books translated into multiple languages. Out of the Blue is her first book translated into English for a U.S. audience. She hosts a children’s TV show in Denmark and is Head of Education for the Cross-Media School of Children’s Fiction. She says she is interested in what you can do with language as well as how to use sounds and pictures to convey what cannot be done with language. Out of the Blue is an excellent example of how she uses language in unusual ways and works with an illustrator to play with meaning in visual images.

Anna Margrethe Kjærgaard is a Danish illustrator who has illustrated many books and received many awards. Coffee, Rabbit, Snowdrop, Lost was her first book published in the U.S. and was named a 2022 Batchelder Honor Book. She lives with her family on Bornholm, a small island in the sea.

The translator, Michael Favala Goldman, is a translator of literature, a poet, an educator, and a jazz clarinetist. Given the book’s reliance on sounds, his background as a poet and musician is particularly significant. He has extensive experience as a translator from Danish to English, but this is his first children’s book. Rebecca read this book aloud to him over zoom so he could hear the sounds in Danish before he did the English translation. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Kathy G. Short, University of Arizona

© 2024 by Kathy G. Short

WOW Review, Volume XVI, Issue 3 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on work by Kathy G. Short at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/review/xvi-3/9/

WOW review: reading across cultures
ISSN 2577-0527