Chooch Helped

In Oklahoma, an older sister named Oginalii spends much of the book frustrated with her younger brother Chooch, who tags along everywhere and manages, without meaning to, to ruin her garden and disrupt whatever project she is working on at the time. Her parents reframe the problem for her rather than simply telling her to be patient: Chooch learns by watching, they tell her, and she is one of his most important teachers, a piece of guidance the story lets sit rather than explaining further. The turning point comes when the two siblings go crawdad hunting together, an activity called gigging in the book's own Oklahoma setting, and Chooch, rather than getting in the way this time, catches crawdads with his bare hands and genuinely helps, giving Oginalii, and the reader, a concrete answer to what her parents meant.

Rebecca Lee Kunz builds the illustrations from layered collage, paint, and line work in warm earth tones drawn from the Oklahoma landscape both she and author Andrea L. Rogers grew up in, a specific regional palette rather than a generic outdoors setting. This was Kunz's first children's book after twenty years working in fine art, and her collage based technique gives the book a textured, handmade quality distinct from most recent Caldecott winners' more painterly or digital styles. The book's single sustained scene of two siblings working out how to be around each other suits an early elementary reader as easily as a preschooler, since the crawdad hunt at its center gives a listener something concrete and active to picture rather than an abstract lesson about patience.