Sidewalk Flowers by JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith

Quiet. Gentle. Subtle. Sidewalk Flowers reminds us wordlessly that there is beauty in the banal waiting to be spotted and treasured and shared. The red-hooded little girl we follow in this book seems to innately understand this as she walks through a grey city with her distracted father, seeking out dandelions and thistle, colour poking up between paving slabs.

As the girl moves through everyday scenes of city life, she leaves the wild flowers she picks as gifts for unexpected and unexpecting recipients — a dead sparrow lying on a park path, an old man sleeping on bench, a tough looking dog outside the local bodega, her mother and siblings playing in their back garden. She is love. She transforms the world around her. Notice the little things this book whispers. See what we can not when we are distracted by our own insistence on efficiency and busyness and process. If the little girl is spreading love represented by wildflowers, it is important to note the final scene where the girl tucks the last flower behind her own ear and goes off to find some more.

Sidney Smith’s artwork makes it nearly impossible to choose a favourite image. I could go on but instead I implore you to go out and seek this ravishing work for yourself.

 

 

 

About Stephanie Cummings

Stephanie Cummings is a former BBC Journalist sharing her lifetime love of children's literature and illustration with her two young daughters -- and now with you, too, through Two in a Tepee. Stephanie has an academic background at the undergraduate level in literature and has master's degrees in both anthropology (material and visual culture) and design. She started her professional life in an art gallery and ended up producing radio programmes for BBC Radio 4, before deciding to become a stay at home mum. She lives with her handsome husband (who is sometimes invited into the tepee) in leafy north London.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s