"Sometimes, I go quiet." A girl--hood up, slumping forward in resignation--walks to school, where "I don't know how I am supposed to be./ I am timid. I am small./ How should I sound?/ How should I look?/ When it's my turn/ to speak,/ I go/ quiet." One can hardly blame her. The paintings in I Go Quiet, by musician and debut author/illustrator David Ouimet, depict a gloomy, factory-evoking school where from the front of every child's desk hangs a dehumanizing white mask that the kids wear to some sort of assembly. Think Hogwarts by way of George Orwell.
The girl feels set apart from everyone else: "I am different./ I am the note/ that's not in tune./ I go mousy. I go gray." Sure enough, while the girl's mask has pointy ears like the other kids', hers also has whiskers and a mouselike snout. During the assembly, a spotlight shines down on her: she's caught without her mask on. She flees to the reassuring isolation of the rear of the auditorium. Later, sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria ("I would leave if I could fly"), the girl imagines her escape on the back of a hybrid beast that lofts her into the air. In the real world, she turns to books: "When I read, I know there are languages that I will speak."
Why does I Go Quiet deserve to be on top of a stack of picture books about how reading is power and imagination is liberating? Consider, for example, a double-page spread showing the masked kids marching up and down the school's stairwells. The image resembles a cross section of a machine, each child a dead-eyed cog. Ouimet seems to be speaking (and painting) not about one person's anxiety--he doesn't individualize the girl by giving her a name or parents--but about a larger concern: the seductiveness of conformity, the threat of human obsolescence through automation. From the moment the girl arrives at school until she heads home that night, Ouimet's illustrations are dichromatic: slate and cream, sepia and black, and so on. But on her walk home ("When I am heard/ I will build cities/ with my words"), she sees a moonlit city in color. Later, from her bed, she looks out her window. Outside is a pair of white birds--a change from all the black ones that haunt prior pages, and perhaps a sign of hope. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author
Shelf Talker: In this distinguished picture book set at an industrial-looking school, a shy girl longs to have full command of her voice.