Gemma and the Giant Girl

Children are often fascinated by the notion of scale. What if that bus driving down the street became really, really tiny? What I had a hamster as big as a hippo?

O’Leary plays with this idea in a simple picture book about a girl named Gemma who ponders her “very nice little life”. She has a house with furniture and a clock on the mantel, all in a Victorian-era style. She has a father and a mother and a dog. But right from the beginning, some things in the pictures are skewed. A coat and hat hanging on the coat tree are very small, and the chairs certainly don’t match in size.

Gemma’s parents tell her that is she safe at home with them and that she will always be their little girl. They do, however, want to talk about a different time.

Momma and Poppa told her stories about a time when

there had been a giant. They said that outside their house

was another larger house.

Gemma tried to imagine it, but it made no sense.

There was nothing outside her window.

Then an enormous eye appears at that window, the walls of the rooms open up, and Gemma’s familiar surroundings in what we now know for certain is a dollhouse start to be altered.

New things appeared in the house all the time…

Some of the new things were nice. Some were less nice…

The family all got new clothes. And then new, new

clothes. Gemma felt like a whole new girl.

These last sentences are accompanied by pictures of Momma, Poppa and Gemma dressed in a variety of outlandish garb, more like Halloween costumes than everyday dress. Momma’s long flowered dress is swapped for a farmer’s overalls worn with the same dainty high-heeled shoes. Poppa sports an Elizabethan ruff, a paisley jumper and one rubber boot.

An even greater change occurs when Gemma is plucked from the dollhouse and introduced to yet another different world. The big little girl, a modern-day child whose hair is red like Gemma’s, shows Gemma her room – much like Gemma’s own, but larger, of course – and then takes her into the garden.

The world was bigger than Gemma could ever have imagined.

“Trees,” she thought. “Stars. The moon!”

Gemma couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was.

And yet…

“Home,” she said. “I want to go home.”

For Gemma, home is represented by the cozy, if a bit off-kilter, confines of the dollhouse she shares with her loving family. She can dream of what is beyond her four little walls, but what she wants is her little bed, her little house and her little life.

The gentle illustrations here are sepia and grey washed in delicate greens, a palette that lends the book an old-fashioned feel. The proportions of the dolls and their accouterments and the eye for amusing detail are just right. The text and pictures as a whole seem like an outline in picture book form for the children’s classic The Borrowers.

Gemma and the Giant Girl has a place on the shelves of public and primary school libraries where it will be chosen for lapsit story times and by children who want a quiet read on their own.