Picture Book Monday: Chooch Helped
Jun. 16th, 2025 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI wrapped up the Newbery Honor books of 2025 with Andrea L. Rogers’ Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott Medal this year for Rebecca Lee Kunz’s rich sunset-colored illustrations. It’s a picture book about a long-suffering older sister who watches as her two-year-old brother “helps” various family members complete their tasks, usually by accidentally making more tasks by spilling the flour, pulling up the newly planted garden vegetables, tearing out the stitches in a freshly sewn pucker-toe moccasin, etc.
The sister, standing in for older siblings everywhere, is exasperated. Although of course in the book she moves past that exasperation, once her parents point out that she’s one of her little brother’s most important teachers, I suspect that this book may not be a hit with older siblings. Why does no one ever validate their feeling that their younger siblings are so annoying!!!!
As a youngest sibling, however, I was enchanted, especially because this is exactly the stage my niece is in, although (knock on wood!) unlike Chooch, she’s usually not actively destructive when she “helps.” It just takes twice as long to get anything done when she’s “helping” water the plants or mix the pancake batter. But to an adult, it’s totally worth it to see her attempting to haul around a gallon or water or measure a teaspoon of baking soda.
(A side story: last week, as I was washing up the pancake dishes, she was trying to get a slice of orange onto her spoon. At last she announced, “I’m frustrated.” There is nothing cuter than a two-year-old using a ten-cent word, so of course I stopped to help her get that orange onto her spoon.)
The illustrations are just lovely, too. I love the sunset-hewed pallet, the way that the patterns on the characters’ clothes splash a little past their outlines, the Cherokee motifs that Kunz wove into the illustrations. There’s a particularly gorgeous illustration of Chooch gigging for crawdads with the friend of the family, both of them dark silhouettes against the orange water, and a pale gold moon with a glowing aureole of fireflies.
The sister, standing in for older siblings everywhere, is exasperated. Although of course in the book she moves past that exasperation, once her parents point out that she’s one of her little brother’s most important teachers, I suspect that this book may not be a hit with older siblings. Why does no one ever validate their feeling that their younger siblings are so annoying!!!!
As a youngest sibling, however, I was enchanted, especially because this is exactly the stage my niece is in, although (knock on wood!) unlike Chooch, she’s usually not actively destructive when she “helps.” It just takes twice as long to get anything done when she’s “helping” water the plants or mix the pancake batter. But to an adult, it’s totally worth it to see her attempting to haul around a gallon or water or measure a teaspoon of baking soda.
(A side story: last week, as I was washing up the pancake dishes, she was trying to get a slice of orange onto her spoon. At last she announced, “I’m frustrated.” There is nothing cuter than a two-year-old using a ten-cent word, so of course I stopped to help her get that orange onto her spoon.)
The illustrations are just lovely, too. I love the sunset-hewed pallet, the way that the patterns on the characters’ clothes splash a little past their outlines, the Cherokee motifs that Kunz wove into the illustrations. There’s a particularly gorgeous illustration of Chooch gigging for crawdads with the friend of the family, both of them dark silhouettes against the orange water, and a pale gold moon with a glowing aureole of fireflies.
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Date: 2025-06-16 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-16 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 06:36 am (UTC)(The ten-cent word use that sticks in my head from my most recent visit is when he ate a bite of dinner with great gusto, turned to me, and declared, "This is excellent." I was very hard put not to laugh.)
Anyway, yes, there may be some older siblings who like this book -- I actually suspect my niece, this nephew's big sister, might -- but as a kid I definitely would not have appreciated the moralizing, lol. The little stinkers were so annoying and they weren't interested in learning from me anyway!! It reminds me of a book my mother loved, about why kids should not squabble and fight, that all three of us (squabbling and fighting along) mostly rolled our eyes at. Chooch Helped does sound lovely, though, and great for the right kids..
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Date: 2025-06-17 01:55 pm (UTC)I feel that the older siblings who will most like this book are the ones who are already living its moral, haha. In general I think a lot of picture book moralizing is wasted - either it annoys the people it's supposed to be reforming, or else they just ignore it. When I was a kid I loved Bread and Jam for Frances, which is about a picky eater learning to be less picky, but did I (an extremely picky eater) ever try to live up to its lesson?
Well, maybe a decade later, when as a teenager I began cautiously trying a wider range of foods, perhaps inspired by those long-dormant lessons from Bread and Jam for Frances. But at the time I kept on happily living on a diet of pretzels and braunschweiger.