MANFISH,A Story of Jacques Cousteau
By Jennifer Berne
Illustrated by Éric Puybaret
Chronicle Books, 2008
Category: Picture book biography
Now that the bee book is off my desk for a while, I have turned my attention to a little book that I have been working on for years. It’s a biography, in picture book format, of a great naturalist: Jean Henri Fabre. This book has been through many revisions, has been read by many-an editor, has even seen the bright promise of an acquisitions meeting.
Alas, it is still a manuscript. And a “quiet” manuscript at that. (How quiet can it be if it keeps me awake, slips into my daydreams, won’t let go?) No matter. As a reward for completing the bee book, I am giving myself a week to play, once more, with this quiet book that I adore.
For inspiration, I am letting myself linger over some new picture book biographies. MANFISH was nominated for a 2008 Cybils Award in the Nonfiction Picture Books category. With it, Berne and Puybaret tell the story of Jacques Cousteau in fine style. Puybaret’s long lines and palette choices remind me of Barbara Cooney, and Berne’s text manages to convey Cousteau’s wonder for the world beneath the ocean, his genius for sharing that world with others, and his passion for protecting it.
MANFISH is a quiet book, but the quiet resonates. It is the quiet of the deep sea, the quiet of a watery place without cell phones and traffic jams and road rage, the stirring quiet of a man who “dreamed that someday it would be you, exploring worlds never seen, never imagined.”
It’s official. I like quiet books.