by Kevin Henkes
Kevin Henkes is best known as the writer and illustrator of many popular children’s picture books. Not too long ago he won the Caldecott award for Kitten’s First Full Moon, and his earlier group of books with loveable mouse characters, which includes Wemberly Worried, Owen, and Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, continue to be patron favorites. Henkes is also, however, a very fine writer of fiction for older children. Olive’s Ocean, a book written for junior high school level children, was a Newbery Honor Book. Junonia is his most recent novel, and is most appropriate for a slightly younger readership.
Junonia narrates the story of ten-year-old Alice Rice during her family’s annual vacation to the beach in Florida. Alice’s birthday always occurs during the family vacation, and Alice is looking forward to celebrating it with the friends who stay at other cottages on the beach, children and adults she sees every summer. She is also hoping to find this year a junonia, a rare shell that she hopes to finally add to her collection. But things don’t go as planned. Several of the children and annual vacationers are not able to come this year, and what makes it worse, another annual visitor shows up with a new boyfriend and his very young daughter in tow, a girl who is troubled by her parents’ recent separation, mercurial in temperament, and seems to demand the spotlight in this small community of vacationers. Alice must come to terms with her conflicted feelings and disappointments. She comes to understand that life is more complex than she would have it be, and that always looking for things to be perfect is an expectation she must leave behind. Sometimes the apparent imperfections, however, serve to deepen the value of the good things. The junonia shell becomes an expansive symbol for these themes.
As will be apparent from this synopsis, Henkes is not writing the kind of fast action fantasy adventure that dominates children’s literature these days. On the surface, it would be difficult to say that in his novels very much happens, or that the events related are unusual or dramatic. Henkes’ literary project is to record the psychological nuances of childhood, to give us a portrait of a child engaged in the act of growing up. His fiction recognizes, understands, and honors the interior dramatic life of a child. Certainly this is not the ambition of most contemporary children’s writers, and it might be difficult to say if Henkes is writing for children as much as he is writing about childhood, although I suspect a child reading him at this age might very well find his writing magical for its accuracy in articulating his or her own experience. Whichever the case, his writing has a certain exquisite quality, the nuances of a child’s interaction with other children and adults are drawn with great insight and subtlety. His writing style has a craftsman-like quality. The reader feels that each word was weighed, each metaphor carefully chosen, and the whole reworked many times over in much the same fashion as a poem. He seems to have created literary novels for children, something unusual, quietly powerful, and altogether remarkable.
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