The Little Island
by Leonard Weisgard
Summary
A small island sits alone in the sea through a full turn of seasons, weathering storms, warming under summer sun, and watching gulls, fish and the occasional visiting boat pass by its shores. A kitten arrives one day by boat and insists the island is a separate, self sufficient place with no connection to anything else, until a fish surfaces and tells the kitten what the island itself already seems to know without saying it aloud, that its rock reaches down and connects, underwater, to every other piece of land and sea in the world. The kitten leaves unconvinced or convinced, the book does not entirely say, but the island stays as it was, holding its quiet fact through another turn of weather.
Leonard Weisgard painted the sea and sky in layered washes of blue, green and grey that shift page to page with the island's changing weather, giving the book an atmosphere closer to a mood piece than to an adventure with a beginning, middle and end. Brown's text, written under the name Golden MacDonald, is spare and repetitive in the way her other books for very young children are, built for a parent to read slowly and let a small child absorb rather than follow a plot.
It suits toddlers and preschoolers especially well precisely because so little happens, and the book asks nothing of a reader beyond attention to weather, color and the fish's one quiet piece of philosophy about how nothing is really separate from anything else. Older children looking for a story with characters making choices will find little here; the pleasure is entirely in the pictures' shifting light and the text's calm, unhurried repetition.
Historical Context & Significance
The Little Island won the 1947 Caldecott Medal for a book Doubleday published in 1946 under the byline Golden MacDonald, Margaret Wise Brown's pen name for this and a handful of other picture books, all illustrated by Weisgard and published by Doubleday. That year's runners up were Weisgard's own Rain Drop Splash, Jay Hyde Barnum's Boats on the River, Tony Palazzo's Timothy Turtle, Leo Politi's Pedro, the Angel of Olvera Street and Marjorie Torrey's Sing in Praise, meaning Weisgard was recognized twice in the same year for two different books, once as the winner and once as a runner up.
The Little Island appeared a year before Goodnight Moon, which Harper published in 1947 and which became by far the more famous of the two, leaving The Little Island as the quieter, prize winning sibling to a much better known book. Weisgard illustrated more than two hundred children's books across his career and worked with Brown on at least fourteen of them, making this medal the high point of one of the most prolific writer illustrator partnerships of the era.