Review of the Day: The Yellow Bus by Loren Long

The Yellow Bus
By Loren Long
Roaring Brook Press (an imprint of Macmillan)
$19.99
ISBN: 9781250903136
Ages 3-6
On shelves now.

Picture books are so weird. They’re one of those odd objects that are simultaneously steeped in nostalgia while at the same time appearing as completely new to their intended audience. Adults mostly want to introduce their kids to the books they themselves remember. And since the average adult probably doesn’t tend to remember more than five or six picture books from the past, they tend to equate the notion of “classic” with that nostalgic feeling. That’s why, when they have kids of their own and they realize that man does not live on five or six picture books alone, they stumble up to bookstore employees and children’s librarians and ask for picture books that “feel classic”. And for whatever reason, we all know what they mean, right? Put most simply, it’s a picture book that won’t age poorly. It’s not trying to be zany or wacky or wink too broadly at the audience. A “classic” is supposed to be timeless somehow. Adults don’t know how to define that feeling exactly, but they’ll know it when they see it. That’s why a certain subset of new picture books that are produced every year try to tap into that feeling. The cheapo ones go for the easy and unearned I-love-you feels while the more ambitious try something a little bit different. Loren Long? He’s a member of the “different” crowd. Keen to try something new, his The Yellow Bus is a fascinating combination of a kind of book he’s been doing for years and a whole new direction. The end result is subtle but exceedingly clever when you’re paying attention to what he’s accomplished. Is it a future classic? The answer is in the goats.

In an aerial view, a yellow bus drives through a town. The town is black and white and the bus the only spot of color. The book reads, “There was once a bright yellow bus who spent her days driving.” As we watch, the children who ride her grow older and time passes. Soon the bus is recommissioned to drive older adults. When it can no longer drive it serves as a place to keep warm by the unhoused. After that it’s dragged off to a pasture and inhabited by goats. In each case, the bus is happy with its lot. But when the goats are removed and it finds itself all alone, things look a bit bleak. You might think that the sudden flooding of the valley where the bus sits would be a problem, but now the bus is filled with wonderful colorful fish. “And they filled her with joy.” Front and back endpapers show the town before and after the man made lake, and extensive backmatter discusses Long’s process.

The closest kin to this book is, without a doubt, The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, and for good reason. Long has always felt like the natural successor to the Burton throne, preferring as he does to anthropomorphize everything from trucks to farm equipment in his stories. In The Little House specifically, there is a similar tale of a human made creation going from use to disuse back to use again. Long’s bus, of course, finds a use completely apart from its original purpose, whereas Burton’s house just repeats its cycle over again. Of the two, I have to admit that Long’s vision feels more satisfying and more authentic. But of course there’s another famous picture book that came to mind when I read this book, and that was the hugely controversial The Giving Tree. Just as Long peppers his book with the phrase, “And they filled her with joy,” Shel Silverstein’s book has the repeated phrase, “And the tree was happy”. But where the tree is used and abused by a single child in the prime of that tree’s life, the bus lives out her days as long as she can, and is used in every possible way, long past her expiration date. The words may be similar, but the tone could not be more different.

The trouble with reading a readaloud picture book in your head is that sometimes you miss some of the more pertinent verbal clues. The surprising alliteration of the text was something I didn’t realize was even there until I found myself reading the book to a group of adults. Each time someone enters the bus there’s a slew of onomatopoetic sounds to replicate. Children, “pitter-patter, pitter-patter, giggle, giggle-patter” while goats, “Clip-clop, clip-clop, maaah, maaah-clop.” There’s a pattern to how Long writes out these sounds, but I would recommend practicing a couple times before you try it out on an audience. Still, it really is made for an audience’s ears. Not every picture book can be both a lapsit title and one prepared to enthrall a group. The Yellow Bus appears to have threaded that needle with panache.

Now as I mentioned, Loren Long has spent long hours giving transportation human faces. His Otis series about a little tractor comes immediately to mind, as do the Trucktown books he did with David Shannon, Jon Scieszka, and David Gordon. This book is a far more realistic vehicle, but there is at least one moment when Long can’t resist slipping in a single moment of possible anthropomorphizing. After the goats have left the bus and it’s truly alone again, there’s a moment when the bus sits in a snowy field and one icicle falls from her headlight, mimicking a tear. I suppose there is also the fact that the bus is a “she” throughout the book, but you kind of have to do that if you want kids to identify with objects. Pronouns count.

And now the confession. The first time I read the book, I thought it was merely okay. I honestly didn’t give it much thought. Loren Long has been in this game for years and years, and the trouble with being a reliable illustrator is that sometimes people take you for granted. Long first rose to prominence when he illustrated Madonna’s Mr. Peabody’s Apples back in 2003. Everyone sort of agreed that his style was keen, even if her writing was crap. He did a lot of book jacket work and other projects before consistently ending up on the best seller lists with Truck Town and Otis. Personally, I like his books best when there’s a touch of realism to them. I had been very taken a couple years ago with his work on Someone Builds the Dream by Lisa Wheeler, where he employed a far more realistic style than I’d seen in a while. With that in mind, you’d think I’d have pored over every possible detail in The Yellow Bus, but on my first read I sort of read/skimmed it and put it aside. It took other people showing me the details and who read it aloud for me to realize how much Long has put into this title, both personally and professionally. We’re a long way from Madonna now.

Part of the fun is that Long has packed this thing to the gills with details. To do this, the masochistic fella created a three-dimensional model of the town where it takes place, entirely for his own purposes. But, of course, the town changes over the course of the book, so Long also had to change the model as he created the book to reflect those changes. There are loads of other things to look at as well, though. Pay particular attention to the mom and dog seeing off their kids at the beginning of the book. You can actually see mom’s pregnant belly become a little girl, and the puppy beside her turn into a dog as you flip through. I could also see a kid flipping back and forth between the endpapers (where you get the aerial view of the town) and shots from within the town, figuring out where each scene takes place. It is a book that rewards a close eye.

None of that has anything to do with the style or mood of the book’s art, of course. For this book Long has gone above and beyond, using everything from graphite pencils, charcoal pencils, charcoal dust, acrylic paints, and even X-Acto blades to get chain-link fences just right, and Q-tips for accurate smudging. There is also a general feeling that black and white books for children do poorly. In my experience this is certainly true of comics and graphic novels, but maybe less so for picture books. Here, the book is not colorless but it does use its color carefully and sparingly. The cover gives a bit of a hint of that. There you can see how colorful the bus itself is. The most color happens when living creatures are inside in the bus. The world around them may be black and white, but inside there is life and color and vitality. It’s also true for anything touching the bus. So the goats that stand atop it are just as hued as the ones inside. Where this all gets really interesting, of course, is that final scene of the bus under water. It’s almost as if the color of the bus has leeched out into the surrounding lake, making everything colorful that is anywhere near the bus. In this way, Long almost seems to imply that because color is the bus’s way of showing happiness, this last scene is a particularly happy one for it. It offers a bit of subconscious comfort to those kids that might worry about the bus spending the rest of its days rusting on the bottom of a manmade pond.

When I was a child I would marry everything. My crayons to one another. The cards in a deck of cards to one another. Every inanimate object in my immediate radius was a living breathing creature with a whole internal romantic life that I was free to exploit. I was a child who would have had no trouble believing a yellow bus to have thoughts, dreams, and feelings of its own. Long’s book, for the record, could have messed up any number of ways. That bus could have been too cutesy or too emotional. It could have had a big goofy grin painted on its grill. Or, maybe worst of all, it could have been the same story, but without all the hundreds of little details that allow it to rise up above the pack. Instead, we lucked out. The book’s a gem. Let’s see if the world figures that fact out or not.

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent by publisher for review.

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Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2024, Review 2024, Reviews