I Hear a Pickle

Author: Rachel Isadora
Illustrator: Marikka Tamura
Nancy Paulsen Books (2016)

In fact, "I Hear a Pickle" written by Rachel Isadora is considered an overall effective recently published children's book. However, "I Hear a Pickle" is described as a picture book in children's literature. The story is about children explaining their five senses, such as hear, smell, see, touch, and taste. Having said that, the senses are explained with the children's action of doing something. For example, the child hears, smells, sees, touches, and tastes an object. Therefore, the object in the end is a pickle. In the meantime, the four major components are brought into the story to make it successful for a child to read and understand. 

Children's literature could be observed through a picture book. A picture book is defined as "a special challenge to the critic because they require evaluation of art, text, and how the two work together to create a unique art form" (Horning, 85). To have an overall successful outcome, a children's picture book is required to have four major components. These four components include text, structure, predictability, and picture.
In fact, "I Hear a Pickle" written by Rachel Isadora is considered an overall effective recently published children's book. However, "I Hear a Pickle" is described as a picture book in children's literature. The story is about children explaining their five senses, such as hear, smell, see, touch, and taste. Having said that, the senses are explained with the children's action of doing something. For example, the child hears, smells, sees, touches, and tastes an object. Therefore, the object in the end is a pickle. In the meantime, the four major components are brought into the story to make it successful for a child to read and understand. 
Presently, the first component presented to make the book overall effective is the text used. "Since most picture books are thirty-two pages in length, and since most of those pages are covered with illustrations, their texts are necessarily short" (Horning, 88). This is because children are limited of certain ways to obtain knowledge from a book that is out of their level. Located in the "I Hear a Pickle" children's book, the author uses up to 15 words per page. For this reason, it allows a child to understand the quality of the text without feeling overwhelmed or puzzled. However, the text of the children's book leads into the structure of how it is made. 

Meanwhile, the next component of how "I Hear a Pickle" is an overall effective children's book is the use of structure. The four components that make up structure is rhythm, rhyme, repetition, and questions. The book holds a variety of sentences that include repetition. According to "From Cover to Cover", Horning relates repetition to Brown's writing by stating, "By doing so she is using a familiar, expected pattern to make children feel comfortable and ready to face the familiar and unexpected" (Horning, 90). For example, in "I Hear a Pickle" repetition is used within the words of, I hear, I smell, I taste, I see, and I touch. Having said that, this creates a child to predict what is going to be said next. 

Another component used in "I Hear a Pickle" to make it overall effective is predictability. "Sometimes writers of picture books build predictability into the text with repeated actions or phrases or by using the same sentence structure over and over again" (Horning, 92). Rachel uses much repetition for the child to know what comes next. However, reading a similar sentence over and over will cause the child to know more about the five sentences stated in the book. 

Lastly, the picture is a huge quality for a book to have to be overall effective. "Artists must make decisions about composition, or how to arrange the elements on each page" (Horning, 94). To create a picture in a book, things such as line, shape, texture, color, and value need to be included. Curved shapes are used in Rachel's to create the child or animal on each page. Also, the colors used on each page are warm, meaning red, yellow, or orange. The location of the text and picture create a huge difference in the reader's eyes. However, "I Hear a Pickle", the text and illustrations are located differently of each page. This creates excitement for a child to read the book. 

In conclusion, "I Hear a Pickle" is an overall effective children's picture book. It has noticeable elements in showing the four components that include text, structure, predictability, and picture. Some may disagree, but based on my reasoning's it shows clearly. 

Review by Bailey Bellitto