The World in Our Backyard

The cover of The World in Our Backyard shows two doors flung open to a view of inviting green space. A boy and a girl look ready to celebrate the wonder of exploring all that is out there in the backyard. But Vancouver author and artist Gigot deals with a broader theme, too, which is that anyone anywhere can consider themselves to be sharing the same “backyard”.

From a suburban garden to a city street to a vista of a river that moves into the distance, the short text encourages us to think about our place in our surroundings from a different point of view. Real world landscapes are skewed by childish imagination, so that a sandbox becomes a desert and a spurting fire hydrant a waterfall. One little boy’s vision of what activity there may be underground features an array of colourful buildings, both large and small, and lines of scurrying ants, accompanied by the phrase, “while workers race through bustling cities”.

There are only 91 words in the whole book. The simple sentences provide just a whisper of what is so beautifully elaborated on in the pictures. For example, a double spread shows a Stellar’s jay in the foreground in full voice. Children frolic on a lawn in the middle distance serenaded by a violin-playing cricket, the whole captioned by only these six spare words: “Musicians play their gentle country songs”.

Digitally-rendered illustrations have some of the softness of watercolour and some of the richness and harder edges of pastel drawing. We are invited into each scene by a variety of lively, wide-eyed children of varying ethnicities – no adults in sight! – who are reveling in their surroundings. What young reader could resist the idea of being free to cover a swath of blacktop with chalk or to read by lantern light under a tent made with a quilt and a rope?

The World in Our Backyard definitely references simple, untroubled lives where boys and girls are loved enough to be given small moments of independence. Within those, they are able find out about their own little worlds and to dream about the big one.

Just in time for summer, this lovely little adventure could be shared with a group or with an individual child who would enjoy talking about all there is to be seen and contemplated on in the book’s pages.