I Go Quiet

January 13, 2020
“When it’s my turn/ to speak,/ I go/ quiet.” This eerie, brooding picture book for older readers follows a girl whose sense of alienation isolates and silences her. She trudges alone through an unrecognizable, dreamlike city and into a gloomy, dystopian institution filled with hostile peers. All the children carry catlike masks, to be worn at prescribed times. The girl’s is a mouse mask; in one spotlit scene, she removes it. “I would leave if I could fly,” she says, looking up at the ceiling. Yet there is redemption. Reading is the girl’s solace, she says, and although artwork by musician and artist Ouimet, making his picture book debut, stays dark, readers see intricate, delicate tendrils of life beginning to spread: “When I read, I feel that every/ living thing is part of me.” In this way, she is led to solid ground: “I may be part of everything too,” she decides. “And I am not small.” Though the conclusion doesn’t bear traditional signs of transformation, Ouimet provides the girl with promise: a sense of refuge, faith that all will be well, and a voice that will, “someday,” be heard. Ages 6–8.