Sam, Bangs & Moonshine
by Evaline Ness
Summary
Samantha, known to everyone as Sam, is a fisherman's daughter who fills the gap left by her dead mother with elaborate stories she calls moonshine, telling anyone who will listen that her mother is really a mermaid living out at sea, that her ordinary cat Bangs can talk, that she owns a baby kangaroo hidden away somewhere. Her father warns her, plainly, that her moonshine is going to get someone hurt one day, but Sam keeps telling her tales anyway, and her young neighbor Thomas, who believes every word, takes her mermaid story seriously enough to row out to a real cove in a real storm looking for Sam's mother, taking the cat Bangs along with him. Both Thomas and the cat go missing in the storm that follows, and Sam spends an agonizing stretch waiting to learn whether her own invented story has cost her friend his life. Thomas is found alive, though sick with what the story only describes as a bad throat, and Bangs makes it home too, and Sam, shaken by how close her moonshine came to real harm, apologizes and offers Thomas something true instead of invented, a baby gerbil her father has actually found, small and real enough to be worth more than any mermaid.
Evaline Ness worked across a wide range of print techniques over her career, woodcut, serigraphy, spattered ink and rubber roller printing among them, and her illustrations for this book carry the same textured, hand printed look, rendered in a muted, coastal palette suited to a fishing village. It reads well for children around six to nine, old enough to follow Sam's guilt honestly rather than treat the near tragedy as a joke.
Historical Context & Significance
Sam, Bangs & Moonshine, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1966, won Ness the 1967 Caldecott Medal. The committee named a single Honor book, Ed Emberley's One Wide River to Cross. She had already collected three Caldecott Honor citations in the years just before it, for All in the Morning Early in 1964, A Pocketful of Cricket in 1965 and Tom Tit Tot in 1966, all before winning the medal outright for a book she wrote as well as illustrated.
Ness described her own guiding question as an artist as figuring out "how to maintain freedom within limitation," a fitting description for a story about a girl whose freedom to invent nearly costs her friend his life. The book remains one of the more sober Caldecott winners of its decade, built less around visual spectacle than around a genuine argument between the pleasure of storytelling and the real damage an unchecked story can do.