Du Iz Tak?

Product Information

Ellis is best known as an illustrator, and her oversized gouache and ink spreads deftly balance playfulness and precision, intricacy and airy background. Carson Ellis has created a fantastic microcosm with her usual grace and inventiveness…I was completely captivated by Ellis’s wonderful creatures, their charming little world and their droll language. As a kid one thing I was really interested in was that microcosmic world that’s going on around plants, and I thought other kids would also be interested in that. Very gently, Ellis suggests that humans have no idea what wonders are unfolding at their feet--and that what takes place in the lives of insects is not so different from their own. There’s an elusive yet distinctly joyful quality to Carson Ellis’s picture book that feels like suspended glee, or a laugh caught halfway in the throat.

The strangely incoherent dialogue is a delight to both roll around in the mouth and interpret to suit our own means and imagined storyline. Carson Ellis is the author-illustrator of the New York Times bestseller Home, her debut solo picture book. I don’t speak Chinese so these bugs really do seem to be speaking a language I truly don’t understand.Even backstage is beautiful, with the puppets nestling in an old fashioned sewing box, and the exit corridor decorated with rag-bunting and little Du Iz Tak? Using a made-up bug language, the story is told in the dialogue between the creatures as their world changes. Editors who pitch picture books at international fairs are accustomed to having to explain the text to foreign publishers in a language they both understand, but for Candlewick’s Liz Bicknell, selling the rights to Carson Ellis’s Caldecott Honor book Du Iz Tak?

When the plant grows taller and sprouts leaves, some young beetles arrive to gander, and soon—with the help of a pill bug named Icky—they wrangle a ladder and build a tree fort.At first they wonder what it is; then, as the plant grows larger, they realise they can climb on it. The book attracted strong interest from foreign publishers, and has sold into 11 territories so far. As in a traditional wordless title, the sequential images have to be examined closely so that we can create our own version of the story.

There's an elusive yet distinctly joyful quality to Carson Ellis's picture book that feels like suspended glee, or a laugh caught halfway in the throat. Following the minute changes as the pages turn is to watch growth, transformation, death, and rebirth presented as enthralling spectacle.Ellis (Home, 2015) elevates gibberish to an art form with her brilliant account of a few bugs, who discover a green shoot sprouting from the ground…Readers and pre-readers alike will find myriad visual cues in Ellis’ splendid folk-style, gouache-and-ink illustrations that will allow them to draw meaning from the nonsensical dialogue, as well as observe the subtle changing of the seasons. The story, nominally about the life cycle of a plant experienced by the nattily dressed insects that live around it, is written entirely in dialogue, in a “bug language” invented by Ellis. A ‘gladdenboot’ is peeking up from the soil, a bug buzzes above and a large ladybird bustles about self importantly. I’ve been in children’s publishing for 25 years and this has never happened to me before,” said Bicknell, the book’s editor. Here’s a bright, refined fantasy world to be lost in, and one that has its dark, seasonal drama to boot.