by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 28, 2009   Last Updated: April 09, 2012

"A Sign" seems like a boring title - but this book packs a wonderful surprise into the word. The sometimes rambling text by George Ella Lyon hides a special message which she reveals at the end. George Ella Lyon is a poet, and she's written more than a children's book. It's a statement about her life, and her dreams as a little girl - and ultimately, about what it means to be a writer.

The cover shows a little girl balancing on a low tight rope strung across a lawn. (She's holding a red umbrella.) But as the book opens, Lyon remembers her neighbor from the 1950s — a man who crafted neon signs. Leon Lasseter is shown blowing glass into a curve in a workshop filled with colorful twisty lines. The little girl presses her face against the glass - and it seems magical. "When I grew up, I wanted to make them too," Lyon writes. Her text is expressive — each letter in the sign was "buzzing" and "beautiful." The girl stands in the light of a diner — with a neon coffee sign — and next door is an auto shop with a neon car over its garage.

The story shimmers with photo-realistic illustrations by Chris K. Soentpiet — even if it's just clothes on a line or the family's store. When the family takes a car trip over the mountain, Soentpiet fills the background with acres of autumn leaves —- oranges, yellows, and greens - as the little girl's hair blows wildly in the wind. George Ella Lyon had only written that "Once Daddy drove me around a mountain..." — but Soentpiet drew that mountain filled with two pages of wondrous colors. And on the next page, about visiting a circus, Soentpiet supplies a colorful drawing of six elephants forming a line in the foreground of a vast circus big top, colored with pinks and yellows.

Now the little girl has decided that instead of sign-making, she wants to be a tightrope walker. The smiling performer is lit by bright white lights, holding a pink umbrella above the dark shadowy audience. But then she's watching the TV with her classmates at school, as they watch the first rocket go into outer space, with "its roar and fire and smoke and white plumes climbing." He's "writing a road to the stars," and the young author decides...that that's what she wanted to do. The next drawing even shows her printing a letter to President Kennedy.

There's a bittersweet moment of recognition at the book's end. The 50-year-old writer is shown sitting by her computer in 1998. "I don't bend glass tubes with fire like Leon Lasseter did," she writes, but I try to make my words glow."

"I don't work the high wire fifty feet about your head. I put one word in front of the other here at my desk and hope the story won't fall. And as for that rocket blasting out into space headed for the moon it's your heart I send these words to. They light the dark between us.

"A sign."

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