Anastasia Gonis has been reviewing books for over twenty years. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in Bookseller & Publisher, Good Reading magazine, Australian Book Review, The Age, The Herald Sun, AllWrite, and many other publications. Anastasia currently writes both articles and reviews and is a revered reviewer for Kids’ Book Review. She loves all books, in particular children’s books which for her, contain beauty and joy between the covers. Today, I’m beyond thrilled to welcome her as a guest reviewer of, The Dam by David Almond and Levi Pinfold.
The Dam is at once haunting, heart breaking, exhilarating and exquisitely simple, portraying so much emotion, you’ll want to weep with the beauty of it all. Here’s, Anastasia’s review:
I am filled with awe each time I view any of Levi Pinfold’s illustrations. There is a haunting beauty about them that makes you catch your breath at his ability to create such magnificent work that can easily be taken for an exhibition of canvases in an art gallery. And that’s what you see when you turn the second page, a series of images; canvases on display.
You sigh at the sight of various sized birds – a few flying, others squatting in grass; tall wild grass, a tiny flower in the palm of a weathered hand, an eagle in flight, some blossomed wildflowers, a fox looking into the wilderness, two sheep with one grazing the other looking away, a man with a girl carrying a fiddle, a close-up of the girl’s face side-on, and one of the man’s in the same position.
They are looking at what is and what will be washed away. Because the dam is almost finished. Turn the page and more canvases are on display. They are accompanied by the memories they are connected to that the man and girl recall; of the things that were but will be no more.
Here is where you will break down from sadness as the girl plays her fiddle and farewells the building that conjures up the memories, while the father, tall and stoic, stands beneath the door frame. Their memories like ghosts, dance around them.
They go from house to empty house, filling them with music, fiddling their memories, and watching them turn into mists that float away. When they have finished, out of the valley they walked.
The dam is complete. Everything is covered with water. Within the water the music stays. It is in everything and in them. Permanent. It makes them sing and dance. That can never be washed away.
David Almond is one of the most versatile and talented writers of our generation. His body of work and writing style is most impressive. It claws at you and makes you feel things deeply. Themes address what progress steals from people, and how they cope with loss and change. These flow through the book like the dam that carried it all away.
This is a work of art both textually and visually. I doubt that anyone picking up this book will leave without it, and clutched to their heart.
Title: The Dam
Author: David Almond
Illustrator: Levi Pinfold
Publisher: Walker Books
Publication Date: September 2018 $24.99
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781406304879
For ages: 5+
Type: Children’s Picture book
Reviewed by Anastasia Gonis
