Grasshopper

Grasshopper is a lush and simple story. This wordless picture book, told in watercolours, follows a young girl throughout her day as she explores the natural world around her.

Wordless picture books are a great way for children to practice building narratives based on the pictures they’re seeing. Some wordless books tend to be more conceptual, but Grasshopper leans more towards the simple and is grounded in reality, meaning that it is a great starting point for building this skill. The book opens with a young girl lounging in the sun, watching planes. Ants crawl over her apple core and eventually her face. She is surprised to find a caterpillar inside a pea pod she opens, and then she plays with a beetle. Eventually, the young girl finds a grasshopper and catches it in her hat. As it jumps out, it loses a leg, stuck on the hat. She places the grasshopper in a jar, which eventually smashes, and she lets the grasshopper go free.

One aspect of the narrative that works well is the fact that it doesn’t shy away from reality. From the grasshopper’s losing its leg, to a scene where it eats another grasshopper, readers see those elements of nature that are sometimes left out of picture books, but which are of great interest to children trying to make sense of the world around them. The activities and events in the book are the type of things that any child playing outside might encounter in their day-to-day life. They are also the types of activities that allow for embellishment or speculation as readers make sense of what is happening in the pictures. Perhaps the creatures have names, or the fighting grasshoppers have history; all that is up to the reader to decide. This is, of course, no different from what children often do with picture books with text. The downside to this method of storytelling for this story is that the through lines of the narrative are there if you look for them, but they may not be immediately apparent to very young readers.

Ukhova tells her story beautifully with her use of watercolours. The colours are bright, with pops of orange and pink on the deep greens and blues of the grasses and plants that feature heavily throughout the book. She also has some opportunities to show her talents with the brush. The changing opacity of the young girl’s sunglasses when seen from different angles or the distortion of a cat’s paw and grasses through smashing glass are particular highlights. It is obvious that Ukhova put great thought and care into the world she is representing. The reader gets the feeling that the young girl is truly somewhere wild, even though she is seemingly not far from home. Houses in the background are surrounded by fences, separating them from the natural world, and are painted with harsh straight lines in contrast to the organic forms that compose everything else in the book. There are a few minor sticking points with the images. In a few pages, we see squiggly lines that seem to represent the flight paths of bugs. We see this with the grasshopper on one page, but sometimes those flight paths are present with no bug to be seen at the end of them. One highly stylized page also sticks out as somewhat confusing. It is composed of symmetrical hexagons filled with different images, each surrounded by dotted lines as though intended to be cut out and assembled. Are they sights through the glass jar? Memories? Initially, it appeared as though this was to represent seeing through the grasshopper’s eyes, but, later in the book, there is a two-page spread filled with the grasshopper’s perspective which is drawn quite differently. That page is well-done, featuring roughly fifty images of a cat, paw extended towards the grasshopper, invoking a sense of danger.

Overall, Grasshopper is a successful and entertaining picture book. While the narrative may not jump out at young readers, and there are a few images that may confuse children, they will more than likely simply see them as ‘beautiful’ rather than confusing. This book would be great read one-on-one with a parent or used in a daycare setting to discuss insects and nature. Grasshopper is a good purchase for most libraries, especially those with few wordless titles.