Synopsis:: High in the air, a pigeon mistakes a glass skyscraper for sky. It crashes into a window and falls to the ground where it lies unnoticed, except by a small boy with his mum. The mum allows the boy to rescue the pigeon by taking it home, where, together with his dad, the family nurse the pigeon until its broken wing heals. Then they take it back to the city where they found it and release it back into the sky.

Review: This is a lovely story about compassion, a family coming together to help someone, and then about being able to let go. It's about the ability to love the unlovely and a mother being able to overcome social standards (picking up a dirty, wounded pigeon off the street) to accommodate her son's urge to show love to something. It's just a little pigeon, but by helping it, three people are ennobled as they care for it and at the same time express their love for each other. It's also about illness and waiting and hope for recovery. Despite the book's title, there is nothing the boy can do to 'heal' the bird's wing, but he can provide it with love and a safe place so that there's a chance that the healing can happen by itself.

Graham's work is remarkable in the way it nestles so comfortably in both the genres of picture book and European-style graphic novel, or bande-dessinée. (The look reminds this reviewer very much of another book by Gregory Rogers.)

Graham employs comic book techniques, but keeps them visually easy to follow in the nature of a picture book. He varies the layouts and pacing, sometimes using several comic panels on a page and sometimes just one picture. By using several frames on a page, this allows the action to be more cinematic than in a more traditional picture book, and we're able to reflect on what's happening in more stages of the story's progress. This helps capture small moments, such as three panels which show first the pigeon's box, then a full-body shot of the sleeping pigeon, then an intimate close-up of the sleeping pigeon's face.

Graham uses a loose, classy looking drawing style with restrained but effective use of colour. Interestingly, the colour seems to follow the boy's emotional journey from his own perspective. The adult city pedestrians are painted in drab grey tones, while a burst of warm colour spotlights the boy on the street cradling the downed pigeon. But on a closer reading of the picture, one notices that while many of the adults look busy and preoccupied, several of them showing care for their own companions: pushing a wheelchair, assisting an elderly person, walking together in friendly ways. But true to a child's experience, he doesn't see this, his relationship with the pigeon is his focus and the spot of warm colour highlights his burst of compassion and his togetherness with the pigeon in a sea of what to him seems like frightening anonymity.

 Back at home, the child feels warmer and safer and the colours reflect this. (This reviewer was amused by Rogers' visual shorthand for suburb, a ring of houses around an island of skyscrapers.) When the boy has to leave the pigeon alone at night to sleep, the colours grow cold again, the living room is lit only by the white light of the telly and we sense the boy's fear for the pigeon and sadness at leaving it alone. As the pigeon begins to heal, the colours of the house fade and colour starts to call the pigeon outside the window. We begin to sense that the cosy home isn't enough and the pigeon will need to be released.

Returning to the city with the pigeon, the boy now sees the city in colour instead of greys; it is now a place where he is the rescuer and ennabler, not the one feeling small and lost. In the beginning of the book, we only see the reflection of the sky in the skyscraper. At the end of the book, the pigeon is released into the real sky, creating both a circular feeling and contrast.

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2008-07-04