Make Way for Ducklings
by Robert McCloskey
Summary
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard fly over Boston looking for a safe place to raise a family, rejecting one spot after another until they settle on a small island in the lagoon of the Boston Public Garden. Mrs. Mallard hatches eight ducklings, Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack, and spends the following pages teaching them to swim, dive and walk in a line, while Mr. Mallard sets off to scout the wider Charles River, promising to meet the family again in a week. When the ducklings are ready to make the same journey on their own, Mrs. Mallard leads them straight through downtown Boston traffic toward the Public Garden, and a police officer named Michael stops cars in every direction so the family can cross safely, block by block, until they reach the pond and the waiting Mr. Mallard.
McCloskey drew the ducks in warm sepia toned charcoal rather than the bright flat color common to picture books of the period, a choice that came out of real research: he studied ducklings at the American Museum of Natural History, consulted an ornithologist, and kept live ducklings in his own apartment to watch how they actually moved. That close observation shows on the page in small, specific gestures, the tilt of a head, the particular waddle of a duckling learning to walk, that give the family real personality rather than generic cuteness. It reads aloud quickly and rhythmically, and very young children tend to fixate on naming the eight ducklings by their rhyming names as much as following the plot, which turns repeat readings into a kind of game in themselves.
Historical Context & Significance
Make Way for Ducklings won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for a book Viking published in 1941. That year's runners up were Maud and Miska Petersham's An American ABC, Velino Herrera's In My Mother's House, Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea and Wanda Gág's Nothing at All.
The book's afterlife has outgrown the medal itself. Sculptor Nancy Schön cast a bronze statue of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings for the Boston Public Garden, unveiled in 1987 near the route the family follows in the book, and it now anchors an annual Duckling Day parade with roots in the 1970s. In 1991 First Lady Barbara Bush gave a duplicate of Schön's statue to Raisa Gorbacheva as a gift tied to arms control negotiations between the two countries, and it stands today in a Moscow park. Massachusetts named the book its official state children's book in 2003, and by then it had sold more than two million copies, figures that make it one of the best selling Caldecott winners of any decade.