A Story Is to Share: How Ruth Krauss Found Another Way to Tell a Tale

To tell the story of Ruth Krauss (1901–1993), an unconventional person who became a writer of unconventional picture books, the creators assemble playful phrases and vignettes in the spirit of their subject. For only child Krauss, “sickness sticks around a lot/ and steals her voice away.” What to do? In ink, watercolor, and gouache, Arsenault paints a tiny figure at work, head bandaged, writing, drawing, stitching pages together to make a book: “She finds another way to tell a tale,” Higgins writes. Krauss finds “another way to play a song,” too, experimentally addressing a violin’s strings, but receives rejections when she considers creating a book. Knowing that Krauss’s story ends in triumph gives the subject’s idiosyncrasies particular significance in a light picture book tribute that foregrounds new ways to think about art-making over a substantive look at the subject’s life. Ages 4–8. (Oct.)