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“Once there was a little girl who didn’t understand
about time.” |
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So, with deceptive simplicity --- for who, of any age, does understand
time, really? --- does Charlotte begin
Over and Over,
one
of her best-loved and most often reprinted books.
First published
in 1957, reissued in hardcover in 1985, and then published again in
paperback in 1995, this book about the cycles of the year is as enduring
and timeless as those cycles themselves. |
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And, unlike many of CZ’s reissues,
Over and Over
has
always had the same illustrations, by Garth Williams. Perhaps this is
because they are so perfect, one simply couldn’t imagine any other
artist coming so close to capturing the text so seamlessly. Though
slightly old-fashioned to today’s eye (what we are used to now in
children’s books is more cartoonish and vividly colored, less literal),
the pictures are as timeless, detailed and lovely as the text, and
several generations of children have pored over them with fascination.
As a reader-reviewer at amazon.com
notes, “I found this book again in the library the other day after not
having seen it since I was a little girl. I must have studied the
illustrations in perfect detail because I remember them as if it were
yesterday and not 20 years ago.” Another reader told Charlotte’s
daughter that she remembers being riveted by the painting of the little
girl looking down into a carved jack-o-lantern, noticing how its lit
candle illuminating the lower half of her face. (This is part of the
gift of picture books when illustration and text mesh perfectly; they
awaken us not only to the subject of the book, but to the beauty of
visual art and the written words themselves.) |
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“… all mixed up in her mind.” |
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The
unnamed little girl who doesn’t understand time in
Over and Over
stands at the border between the hardly differentiated passage of days,
weeks, and months, and the dawning sense of memory and déjà vu. This
happened before… I think. She’s so young she doesn’t understand the
days of the week, the months of the year, or even the four seasons (all
of which Charlotte thoughtfully enumerates, just in case a young reader
might be in the same predicament as the little girl). "What she did know
about was all mixed together. She remembered a crocus but she didn’t
know when." |
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"She
remembered a snowman and a pumpkin, a Christmas tree and a birthday
cake, a Thanksgiving dinner, and valentines. But they' were all mixed up
in her mind." When she awakens one morning to find that it’s snowed, her
excitement is palpable; at least, to her mother, who, slowly and gently,
begins a discussion. But when the mother has explained snow and winter,
then, the little girl has another question: "What's next?"
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And so,
she and her mother continue through the seasons and the holidays,
bringing a full turn on the wheel of a year. |
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The circle of a year |
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Those who study children’s literature would describe
Over and Over
as “a concept book”, for it teaches the concept of time’s passage,
life’s cycles, days, weeks, and months adding up to a year which then
repeats. But that classification no more captures
Over and Over’s
essence than a chloroformed butterfly pinned to black velvet touches a
living monarch fanning its wings on the curled petals of a bright red
bergamot blossom. That essence is the blend of the everyday with the
wondrous; the reassurance of routine and predictable cycles with the
exhilaration of the large and small miracles which come and go; that
life-force which is the alternating current of permanence with
transition. |
Her
daughter,
Crescent
Dragonwagon
(now in her early fifties), can say this with certainty, for she was
five when the book was published, and four when it was written. The
little girl’s questions were her own; the mother’s answers were
Charlotte’s. And now Charlotte is almost 90, and sometimes, like the
little girl, all the things she has seen, done and experienced get a
little “mixed up in her mind.” But usually, both she and Crescent can
see that this, too, is part of the cycle, and happens, as it is bound
to, over and over.
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School
activities: helping children articulate the seasons
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“I am reading
Over And Over
today to all my classes. I have cut-outs of suns, bunnies, leaves, fish,
shamrocks, etc.... I am going to ask the students to choose one that represents
a season and have them write some seasonal words on them. We will hang them all
over the library.”
---
Kimberlee Ent, 43, school librarian at Hampden Elementary,
Mechanicsburg,
Pennsylvania
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"I enjoy your book Over And Over. It's a very
pleasing book. I like it because the little girl is curious. She always has
something to look forward to. Another reason I like the book is that the
holidays will happen repeatedly.
My first name is Charlotte, too. I'm in third grade and go to Scott L.
Libby Elementary School.
A reading fan,
--- Charlotte J.
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