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Authors and illustrators are playing with multiple story lines, narrators, and perspectives to create books that are exciting because of their unpredictability.
Once upon a time there was a story about three little pigs. These little pigs remained steadfast over the centuries building their respective houses and having their respective encounters with the wolf. As in all good oral tradition tales, the stories vary slightly but the underlying structure and central concepts remain constant. There once were three little pigs. They built houses of sticks, straw, and bricks. The wolf stopped at each house. The classic verbal interchange then ensued, "Little pig, little pig, let me come in." "No, no, not by the hair of my chiny, chin, chin." "Then I'll puff, and I'll huff, and I'll blow your house in."
And the wolf did, with success two-thirds of the time. These stories, told through an omniscient narrator, proceed in a linear pattern from beginning to end and come to a clear, optimistic resolution. The illustrations and text work synergistically, reflecting and extending each other's meaning. The pictorial elements are designed with foreground, mid-ground and background spatial planes, with most of the action occurring in mid-ground space. This organization of the narration and illustrations is true not only for this familiar folktale but for most picture books (Hearne, 1998; Norton, 1999; Huck, Kiefer, Hepler, Hickman, 2004; Galda and Cullinan, 2002).
David Wiesner won the Caldecott Medal in 2002 for his rendition of The Three Pigs. In the tradition of retelling oral tales, Wiesner added his own interpretation. But this story is qualitatively different. Not only are details and descriptive components altered, but the underlying structure and the semiotic codes are also changed. The story does not go in a progressive linear pattern and the illustrations at times contradict rather than support the text. The artificiality of fiction is revealed. Book pages become elements of the story rather than passive backgrounds for words and pictures. The images now are designed with five potential spatial planes-background, mid-ground, foreground, space that exists off the page (the space between the surface of the page and the book's audience), and space under and around the individual pages.
Something quite dramatic is happening in this book. The Three Pigs crystallizes...