By Jeannie Baker
Two boys, one in Sydney and one in a Moroccan valley, live the same day at the same time, and you read both of their books at once with a hand on each.
Open the case and there are two books in it, sitting side by side. The left one is a boy in inner-city Sydney. The right one is a boy in a village in the Valley of the Roses in Morocco. You open them both and turn the pages together, one in each hand, and the two days run in step. Both boys wake up. Both families eat. Both go out to shop, one to a supermarket and a hardware place, one across country to a market where a carpet is traded for goods. The pictures answer each other across the gap between the two books all the way through, and at the end the two families turn out to have touched each other's lives without either of them ever finding out. Jeannie Baker made every picture as a collage out of real things, sand, cloth, wire, tin, plant material and paint, and then photographed them, so the pages have grit and thread in them. There is no story text in either book at all.
The two-books-in-one is the reason to reach for this rather than any other book about two countries. Nothing is compared for the children. The comparison sits in their two hands and they have to do it themselves, and because there are no words in either half, the child who has been in the country three weeks does exactly the same job as the child who has been here since birth. It is also the rare book on this subject that refuses to make the Moroccan family the interesting one and the Australian family the normal one. They get identical space, identical structure, identical weight, and the design forces you to hold both at the same moment, which is a much harder argument to wriggle out of than a sentence about how we are all the same really. The collages reward a slow class enormously; there are things in the market pages a group will still be finding on a third look.