One Giant Leap

Thao Lam is developing an impressive body of work with picture books including Thao and The Paper Boat. Both of those books contained autobiographical elements reflective of Lam’s Vietnamese origins and her move to Canada, encountering new things and new challenges in a new country. Lam has now lived in Canada for decades. As such, she has become used to snow. Indeed, she seems to have grown weary of it. It seems to have lost the magic and beauty it once held. However, seeing snow through the eyes of her young daughter provided Lam with a fresh perspective. In One Giant Leap, Lam combines her imagination and talent with the fresh way of seeing the world that her daughter’s experiences brought to the fore.

As was the case with The Paper Boat, One Giant Leap is a wordless book. In the hands of an artist as skilled as Lam, though, a picture certainly does tell a thousand words. One Giant Leap is a terrific book and will be an award-winner. Lam’s heavily textured collage illustrations reward repeated readings with added details and new discoveries. The inspiration for the book came when Lam watched her daughter venturing out to explore a world suddenly changed by a fresh snowfall. Lam saw it as akin to an astronaut exploring a foreign surface in outer space—hence the book title is a reference to Neil Armstrong’s famous words when he first set foot on the moon.

The illustrations feature images of an astronaut jumping and floating, walking and running, climbing, and trying to make sense of an alien world. The opening and closing pages, however, reveal that astronaut to be a snow-suited child initially leaving from, and later returning to, a more familiar earthly environment.

The book begins with a child zipping up her snowsuit and pulling on snow boots, mitts, a scarf, and a warm hat. An elevator ride in a ten-story building then takes the child to the ground floor—the 10, 9, 8 …. elevator descent reflects the countdown to a rocket launch. The protagonist who emerges from the elevator is not the child who entered. Rather, it is a fully space-suited astronaut, ready to leave her apartment building to venture into the world outside. Then follows an astronaut’s journey—one small step at a time, albeit augmented with jumping, floating, and falling—through a moonscape. Towards book’s end, the astronaut transforms back into the child with friends in a coat room of a school building. The supposed-astronaut’s journey has been from the child’s apartment to her school. Three school friends have divested themselves of their coats. One coat is pink, another is green, and another is blue—not coincidentally, these are the same colours as the three space aliens the astronaut encountered on her journey.

The final double-page spread depicts a snow-covered cityscape. The contours of the city buildings mirror contours of the moonscape the astronaut explored. Beyond the general shape of the buildings, some specific details are noticeable too: the school playground slide is reminiscent of the spotted creature the astronaut climbed and slid down the back of; the schoolyard flag reminds one that the astronaut planted a flag on the moon surface; the pink-spotted playground equipment is not dissimilar to the pink-spotted object on the moon; the shape and colour of the playground swing set is similar to the green and blue object the astronaut passed; the stick discarded in the snow looks a lot like the flagpole the astronaut used; the scarf lost in the snow is the same colour and pattern as the flag; shapes can be seen drawn in the snow, and those shapes are the same as the ones the astronaut stopped to draw in the dust of the surface of the moon. All of this is masterful. Lam has taken a child’s everyday journey from home to school and reimagined that journey as a marvellous adventure when seen through the eyes and imagination of her daughter’s first encounters with snow. Brilliant. Simply, brilliant work.

The book design is suitably enticing for such a delightful book. When one peels back the eye-catching dust jacket, it reveals the front cover features a solitary footprint reflective of the footprint of humankind on the moon. The endpapers that serve the functional purpose of binding the cover to the pages of the book are paint-speckled—splashes of white paint on a black background, giving the appearance of a star- and planet-filled night sky. It is beautiful work by Thao Lam and by the publisher, Owlkids Books.

Watch for forthcoming award lists. I will be shocked if One Giant Leap does not feature prominently. The world is a much better place when one can see wonder in everyday things. Lam has that ability. With this book, she endows her readers with opportunities to similarly develop this magical, world-changing skill. One Giant Leap is a must-have book. It is suitable for pre-schoolers and early elementary students but, in reality, it will appeal to people with imaginations, regardless of their age.