Blue Rider
by Geraldo Valério (Author)
On a gray and crowded city sidewalk, a child discovers a book. That evening, the child begins to read and is immediately carried beyond the repetitive sameness of an urban skyscape into an untamed natural landscape.
The child experiences a moment of true joy, and as if in response to that single blissful moment, people seem to come alive in all the other rooms of the apartment block.
Thanks to the power of one book, an entire society is transformed. In creating this book, Geraldo Valério was inspired by the German Expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which formed in Munich in 1911 and included painters Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.
These artists sought to find the spiritual significance in art, with an emphasis on form and color. In turn, Valério has created a wordless book that speaks volumes about how art can transform us beyond the sometimes-dreary world of the everyday.
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Publishers Weekly
This wordless story opens with a spread of city buildings in quiet blues and grays. A girl stands at an apartment window surrounded by dozens of identical windows. Venturing outside, she's jostled by crowds of people staring at their phones, listening to music, or walking their dogs and babies. Suddenly, she spots a book on the street, picks it up, and holds it close. That night in bed she opens it; readers view it with her. Across its pages gallops a blue horse with mane and tail like fireworks--orange, yellow, magenta. It leaps from the pages and across the city sky, shedding shapes of turquoise, magenta, and lime. The colors and shapes that make up the horse grow bigger and brighter, dissolving into increasingly abstract collages. At last the girl is seen on the horse herself, galloping away. Back in her room, she closes her eyes in blissful reflection. Like an urban companion to his rural dreamscape adventure, Turn on the Night, Valerio's fantasy offers the girl all the splendor that's missing from her cookie-cutter surroundings. It's a dazzling vision of the way art transcends the everyday. Ages 4-7. (Mar.)
Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.School Library Journal
K-Gr 2--Colors and shapes dominate the imaginative romp of a city girl. The wordless story opens with a child peering out of her high-rise apartment. She ventures outdoors into mobs of busy people of all ages, and comes upon an abandoned blue book featuring a jumping horse on its cover. She embraces it, takes it home, and reads it in her stark bedroom. Valerio gives viewers a close-up of the steed with rainbow mane and tail. The heroine imagines the horse flying over the city, dropping brightly colored shapes across the sky like confetti. As the horse speeds up on following spreads, the shapes grow larger and more varied until they finally block out the horse entirely. Several pages follow, each overflowing with abstract blocks that finally release the horse, with the child on its back. At last, she is shown asleep in her room, which is now transformed with the shapes and colors she's dreamed up. The contrast of the city's earth tones and repetitive shapes deftly contrasts with the bliss of brightness that comes later. VERDICT Art teachers should employ this for student inspiration. --Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA
Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.JUV051000 - Juvenile Fiction | Imagination & Play
JUV003000 - Juvenile Fiction | Art & Architecture
City and town life
Imagination
Books and reading
Imagination in children
Color in art
