The Hello, Goodbye Window was the 2006 Caldecott Medal award winner. It is written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Chris Raschka. The story is about a little girl who goes to visit her Nanna and Poppy. Their house has a kitchen window (that looks like a regular window but isn't, according to the little girl) called the Hello, Goodbye Window. You can peek in the kitchen through the window, at night the window acts like a mirror, before bed you can look out the window to tell the stars goodnight, you can look through it to tell the garden good morning, anyone might come by the window (a T-Rex, the pizza delivery guy, or the queen of England), and you can blow goodbye kisses through the window.
This book perfectly captures the magical relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, or at least it is reflective of my relationship with my grandparents. Juster does an excellent job of capturing the wonder that a child has toward all the stuff in their grandparents house such as glass jars on the shelves or pictures from the olden days. Things such as helping Nanna in the garden, listening to Poppy play the harmonica, or eating Poppy's "specialty" breakfast are normal activities that are that much more fun just because they are at Nanna and Poppy's house. I loved how the little girl says that when she takes her nap "nothing happens until I get up". That is such a perfect example of how young children aren't quite able to comprehend that things are happening when they are not around, such as the fact that Nanna and Poppy might actually do things while she naps - contrary to her belief.
My favorite quote in The Hello, Goodbye Window was "You can be happy and sad at the same time, your know. It just happens that way sometimes." This quote is in reference to the little girl getting picked up by her parents and being glad to go home but sad to leave her grandparents. I think that mixture of feelings is very hard for children to understand or identify, and yet being happy and sad at the same time is a state of emotions that many people experience. This book helps to show children that being happy and sad at the same time can happen and that is is ok when it does.
At first glance I didn't like the cover of the book because it had a lot of yellow and I just don't like yellow. However, the pictures inside are excellent. They are drawn/colored/created in a way that make it look like a child drew them. They appear to be a mixture of markers, watercolors, and pastels. In spite of their child-like quality the pictures are quite detailed. I actually didn't notice until someone else pointed this out, but the girl is mixed - her mom is black and her dad is white; also Nanna is black and Poppy is white. So even though the book never says anything about the race of the family it still portrays the family dynamic of multiple races that I feel isn't addressed often in children's books. On a bit of a tangent, this also made me wonder about how an author and an illustrator work together. Does the author tell the illustrator what he/she is envisioning for the pictures of does the illustrator just read the story and draw what they think it should look like. Since the book never talks about the multiple races, I wonder if Norton Juster imagined that has he wrote the characters or if Chris Raschka decided on the race of each character. Either way, I liked seeing a book that hints toward this diversity.
This was by no means my favorite children's book of all time but I definitely liked it. I thought The Hello, Goodbye Window did a great job of capturing the whimsy and magic of visiting with grandparents.
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