Year of the Jungle

Starred review from May 27, 2013
In this picture book, Collins sensitively examines the impact of war on the very young, using her own family history as a template. Suzy is the youngest of four children—Proimos draws her with impossibly big, questioning blue eyes and a mass of frizzy red hair—and she is struggling to understand the changes in her family. “My dad has to go to something called a war,” she explains. “It’s in a place called Viet Nam. Where is Viet Nam? He will be gone a year. How long is a year? I don’t know what anybody’s talking about.”
When Suzy learns that her father is in the jungle, she imagines something akin to the setting of her favorite cartoon (Collins suggests it’s George of the Jungle). As the months wear on, though, Suzy begins to piece together the danger her father is in, whether it’s through the increasingly unnerving postcards he sends (one reads, “Pray for me,” in closing) or by catching a snippet of wartime violence on the news. “Explosions. Helicopters. Guns. Soldiers lie on the ground. Some of them aren’t moving.” In four wordless spreads, Proimos makes Suzy’s awakening powerfully clear, as the gray jungle she initially pictured (populated by four smiling, brightly colored animals) gives way to a more violent vision, as the animals morph into weapons of war. Just when Suzy’s confusion and fear reach an apex: “Then suddenly my dad’s home.”
As in Collins’s Hunger Games books, the fuzzy relationship between fear and bravery, and the reality of combat versus an imagined (or, in the case of those books, manufactured) version of it is at the forefront of this story. By the final pages, Suzy has come to understand that “Some things have changed but some things will always be the same.” It’s a deceptively simple message of reassurance that readers who may currently be in Suzy’s situation can take to heart, whether their loved ones return changed, as hers did, or don’t return at all. Ages 4–up. Agent: Rosemary Stimola, Stimola Literary Studio.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
First-grader Suzy's father is in the jungles of Vietnam for a year. Through a tightly controlled child's point of view, readers live the year with little Suzy in the sheltered world her parents have built for her. She understands little at first, imagining romps in the jungle with elephants and apes. Her father sends her postcards every so often with cheery scenes of the tropics. Eventually, the postcards stop coming. She misses her dad, especially when her brother takes over some of her father's duties, like reading the comics or Ogden Nash's poems to her. One day, the wall of protection is broken by the television, with frightening visions of explosions, helicopters, guns and dead soldiers. Her mother whisks her away, too late. Proimos' ink-and-digital art, in his signature cartoon style, adds needed humor to a frankly scary story that honors Suzy's experience and respects those who share it. Occasional full-page wordless spreads allow readers to see into Suzy's mind, beginning with her flying through the jungle and leading up to her post-epiphany anxiety about tanks and helicopters and rifles. With a notable lack of patriotic rhetoric or cliches about bravery and honor, Collins holds firm to her childhood memories, creating a universal story for any child whose life is disrupted by war. Important and necessary. (Picture book. 4-10)

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August 1, 2013

K-Gr 3-This moving picture book recounts, through the author's eyes as a child, the year of her father's military tour of duty in Viet Nam. The youngest of four kids growing up in a safe, loving family, Suzy is first seen listening to her dad read Ogden Nash's poem about Custard, the dragon who stays brave despite his inner fears. Thus the stage is set for her father's imminent deployment. In this pre-Internet world, his postcards provide tenuous but tangible connections as the first grader tries to comprehend what a jungle is, what her father is doing there, and the passage of time ("Has it been a year yet?"). But Suzy's concerns increase when Dad confuses her birthday with a sister's, and then the postcards cease. When one abruptly surfaces, Dad signs it, "Pray for me." (She does, "very hard.") Television news and a near-drowning incident during a swimming lesson feed the child's anxieties. Suddenly, Dad is home, "tired and thin... his skin... the color of pancake syrup." Suzy struggles to articulate her harbored fears, which he gently allays, and the two resume reading about Custard, whose stoicism surely resonates more deeply for them. Vibrantly colored cartoon illustrations, outlined in thick black ink, underscore a child's point of view. The characters' enormous eyes and boldly colored pupils provide an arresting motif. Suzy's increasingly haunted imaginings, depicted on spreads of painterly gray tones with bursts of color, stand in stark visual contrast to the narrative text and illustrations framed by generous white space. The author's spot-on memories paired with child-friendly art create a universal exploration of war and its effect on young children, ideally shared with and facilitated by a sensitive adult.-Kathleen Finn, St. Francis Xavier School, Winooski, VT

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2013
Grades K-3 *Starred Review* Collins mines her own experience to tell a tender personal story of war seen through a child's eyes. First-grader Suzy's father is deployed to Vietnam. At first, though she misses him, she dreams of the exotic jungle. But as the year goes on, marked by Christmas trees and candy hearts, things get harder. His postcards arrive less and less frequently, while news of the war, and its real dangers, comes more and more often. In the end, Suzy's father returns, and while some things are different, some things are the same. Collins' unflinching first-person account details the fears and disappointments of the situation as a child would experience them. And where more realistic illustrations would feel overwrought and sentimental, Proimos' flat, cartoony drawings, with their heavy lines and blocky shapes, are sturdy and sweet, reflecting a child's clear-eyed innocence. While small personal details and specific references to Vietnam fix the story in one child's individual experience, it is these very particularities that establish the kind of indelible and heartfelt resonance that is universally understood. Indeed, children missing parents in all kinds of circumstances will find comfort here. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Heard of a little series called The Hunger Games? Yes, well, this is by the very same author.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)