![](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/seabiscuit1.JPG\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I’m stopping in briefly today to share some art work from Meghan McCarthy’s<\/strong><\/a> newest picture book title, Seabiscuit: The Wonder Horse<\/strong><\/a><\/em> (Simon & Schuster; October, 2008). I love Meghan’s ramped-up cartoon style, what with her bold acrylic illustrations and wide-eyed characters. I’m tellin’ ya, you can spot one of her highly stylized illustrations from precisely seven skerjillion miles away. Does she not put the very “signature” in signature style? Why, yes, I think she does. Am I talking to myself? Why, yes, I think I am. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n {Pictured here are the popular, super-cool kids — the non-doophuses, the sleek horses of the racetracks…}<\/p>\n McCarthy does a fine job of setting tone: On the book’s opening spread, we see a long line of people waiting outside. It’s the 1930s; it’s grey; we see no faces; the lines in the spread bring us down, in more ways than one, as they meet toward the lower center of the spread as a street corner: “People didn’t have much and needed an escape.” Of course, we come to learn, the racetrack was the “perfect escape.” And our underdog, Seabiscuit—who is angry, stubborn, lazy, and in serious need of motivation—was the horse who looked just like us, McCarthy writes: “Beat-up. Imperfect…A horse with courage!” This is precisely where McCarthy nails the book’s greatest strength: Making readers care about Seabiscuit — and holding up a mirror to not only the people of the Great Depression, but to those of us who are imperfect today<\/em>, those of us in whom The Doophus is strong. <\/p>\n But the book’s other strength? Character. McCarthy introduces us to the folks who, indeed, provided Seabiscuit with the motivation needed to win the big race and which resulted in the country’s “Seabiscuit-itis,” as one sportswriter described it — Charles Howard, Seabiscuit’s owner; John “Red” Pollard, his poetry-reading jockey; “Silent Tom” Smith, Seabiscuit’s trainer, who was “much more interested in horses than people and understood the animals well”; and, eventually, George “The Iceman” Woolf, the jockey who replaced Red Pollard at the last minute after Red was injured in an accident just one day before the race. The characters shine; the text is accessible and makes for a great read-aloud; and McCarthy, through both illustrations and text, expertly conveys the excitement surrounding the horse and the 1940 race that won Seabiscuit the Santa Anita Handicap. <\/p>\n McCarthy’s sprawling spreads are “genuinely comic at times,” in the words of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books<\/em>, adding “{t}he goofily appealing horse and the underdog-victory story ensure appeal beyond the usual horse fan, and this could even make an interesting approach to examining the Depression itself.” Writes The Chicago Tribune<\/em>, “McCarthy’s characters, people or horses, have big, round bug-eyes that are portals of energetic light in this dark world.” <\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/seabiscuitcover.jpg\")
Pictured above is Seabiscuit on the verge of racing War Admiral: “Everyone nervously watched the empty racetrack. In came War Admiral. In came Seabiscuit! A hush fell over the crowd. The horses twitched. The riders sat perfectly still.” The book tells the story of the famous Depression-era horse, the antithesis of the “sleek, elegant, muscular, well-bred, and fast,” as McCarthy puts it, race horses of that era. I mean, just look at the great cover: Seabiscuit was rather ….well, he was a doophus. Just flat-out was. “He loved to eat and sleep but hated to run,” McCarthy writes. “He had lost almost every race he had ever been in. His first trainer called him a ‘big dog.’ Who would want a racehorse like that?”<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/seabiscuit.jpg\")
<\/p>\n