Isol, translated from Spanish.
It’s Useful to Have a Duck
Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2009

Rating: E*

What can we do with a duck? When a young boy finds a duck and picks it up, he knows immediately how to answer this question. From a hat to a whistle to a nose, and from riding it like a rocking horse to drying himself off with it to using it for a plug, the boy shows us just how useful a duck can be. But flip the book around and the point-of-view suddenly changes, so that now the duck tells us just how useful a boy can be. The duck can enjoy the view by resting on the boy’s head, or pretend to be a gargoyle by holding on to the boy’s nose. In addition, not only does the boy rub the duck’s back, but the boy also gives it many kisses. And when the boy leaves, it’s easy for the duck to find its little sleeping hole.

Isol uses only two colours in her illustrations, but does so very effectively. Yellow is used on the side that tells us about the usefulness of a duck while blue is used on the side that shows the usefulness of a boy. The drawing themselves are simple, black lines that both outline the features of the figures and objects in the pictures and form the text of the short easy sentences. Since the drawings are not actually coloured separately from the background, the colour of the figures and objects are the same as the background, either yellow or blue.

Young children will love this book. Since the illustrations are exactly the same on both sides of the book, children will have an opportunity to start learning about how the same event can be interpreted in at least two different ways, depending on one’s perspective.

Thematic Links: Toy Animals - Duck; Creativity; Perspective-Taking; Social Responsibility - Understanding Others

Ken Kilback
Vol. 15, number 1
October 2009

*Rating System:
E - Excellent, enduring, everyone should see it!
G - Good, even great at times, generally useful!
A - Average, all right, has its applications.
P - Problematic, puzzling, poorly presented.