This week: Zola’s Elephant by Randall de Seve, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski

A student shared The Whisper, a beautiful picture book written and illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski, and I sought out other books with Zagarenski’s illustrations. I found Zola’s Elephant and fell in love.

“You need a big box to move your elephant,” Randall de Seve writes in the first pages of Zola’s Elephant.

Of course you do.

Zola’s Elephant is about imagination and how it can’t be contained. There’s also a gorgeously rendered parallel universe-effect happening between the narrator’s world and Zola’s world that appeals to my fascination and frequent mind-wanderings in the realm of the What If. This is a book for anyone who regularly finds themselves elaborately re-imagining a familiar space— like finding a third floor in the house that only had two, or floor-to-ceiling windows in a room where there was always just a wall.

And I love love love Zagarenski’s secondary characters —the tiny, beautifully drawn toys who have a presence and their own narrative within the larger story.

Spread from Zola’s Elephant by Randall de Seve, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski