Timothy Decker is the author of one of the most unusual picture books I have come across. The Letter Home, which I reviewed last year, is the spare and striking story of a medic in WWI. You are never certain why he is a medic (although it seems likely from his words that he chose this rather than bear arms), but his dedication to his duty is startling. The whole story is written as a letter sent home and while he writes about his experiences as if they are mundane, Decker's pencil drawings reveal so much more. You don't know who the medic is writing to, although it is a boy waiting at the mailbox on the final page, but you do know he is trying to protect his family from war's ugly truth, even as he struggles to bear witness. At one point he writes of a prayer he learned, "Compassion as action to ease the pain of the world" and that is when you realize that this action - this going to war to tend the wounded - is what this man has done to heal the world. It is a noble act and expressed so well, so quietly and without taking sides or making political charges, that the message is quite breathtaking.

Oh, how I love this book.

I would imagine that Decker has suffered from finding his audience however - war is not a likely subject for young children and his black and white drawings do not scream for attention. But as a military historian I found The Letter Home to be enormously powerful and I think it would be perfect for any older child (say of 9 or so) up to adults. It is a book that makes you think in the best sort of way and I wish - oh how I wish - that it would discover the readers who would embrace it like I have.

Decker has a new book that just came out, Run Far, Run Fast. This time around he writes about an unnamed plague, "the Pestilence", in the 14th century. The protagonist is a young girl who is literally running for her life. She has a family she loves, and until the age of ten her life is good. But then the Pestilence arrives and her father becomes ill and the local townspeople quarantine their home, boarding up the doors and windows. After dark her mother helps her escape; "run far, run fast" she whispers and the girl must go, she must leave all that she loves so she might live. In the pages that follow, Decker writes of how she walks and walks, encountering many people all of whom are also walking somewhere else - all of them trying to get someplace safe. The cities are walled and their entries barred - to keep the Pestilence out - but it "could not be caged". She meets the narrator and they talk about the Pestilence, how it can be stopped, no matter how rich the offering. The girl loses her fear as she understands that fear will not make a difference - nothing will make a difference. She returns to save her family but finds only her brother, in the guarded "pest house" where the sick are shuttled together in a larger attempt at quarantine. The girl and the young boy escape to her kind benefactor who provides kindness and a place to try and heal. She finds peace at last, and safety.

Just like Letter, Run Far, Run Fast celebrates the basic tenants of human kindness and empathy - it is a book that makes the compassionate care of others its centerpiece. Again Decker's drawings are black and white and spare but again they pack a quiet punch. Combined together the two books tell the kind of stories that I have found nowhere else. They glorify kindness, but in an adult manner. I think they are both just amazing and I hope Decker keeps doing the same kind of work for a long long time.

[Post pics both via Timothy Decker's web site.]

Other WCOB Posts:

Make Lemonade at Finding Wonderland:

I deeply wanted to introduce 'possibility' to my students. Most of them had the idea that they were going to die before they turned twenty-one, that they would never find any other kind of life, and that this was how it had to be -- nobody they knew had ever done anything different. They all wanted to somehow ascend the hill of fame, be Somebody Big, and then -- die. Because they couldn't imagine anything more than that.

And so I read them Make Lemonade.

Notes on a Near-Life Experience at Becky's Book Reviews:

So she starts keeping one thing after another from her best friend, Haley. With so many things going wrong, it's good for one thing to be going right. In the midst of the fallout, it seems her brother's best friend, Julian, has finally, finally noticed that she existed as more than a pesky little sister. Could this be true? Could her life-long crush finally be hers?