Black and White

• Black and White
• author & illustrator:  David Macaulay  http://www.davidmacaulay.com/pid=328883
• medium:  unknown (possibly watercolors and ink)

• year of publication: 1990
• publisher city:  Boston, MA
• publisher:  Houghton Mifflin Company
• ISBN:  978-0-395-52151-9
• Caldecott Medal recipient, 1991

Annotation:  Four separate stories are presented simultaneously on a double page format.  They take place on a train, in a house, on a station platform and amongst a herd of cows.  Are the stories really separate, or are they connected?

Personal Thoughts:  David Macaulay has crafted an experimental head-scratcher of a picture book.  Broken down into four stories (Seeing Things, Problem Parents, A Waiting Game, and  Udder Chaos) Macaulay is intentionally challenging readers to decipher the plots and connections between four seemingly unrelated storylines.  The author has little tricks to make the four stories seem to intertwine using common colors, shapes or objects like cows, trains and newspapers.  Black and White will be challenging to everyone who reads it, from fifth graders to twelfth graders because there really is no answer to the mystery.  Nothing in this book, save for the pictures,  is presented in black and white.  While I was impressed by the book's experimental structure, I was also frustrated at its evasive overall meaning.  If  innovation of story structure is a parameter for the Caldecott Medal, then Black and White definitely deserved one.