by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 02, 2010

"Secret Place" shares a serious story about real animals that live in a city. Their habitat is a secret because the narrator wants to preserve it - so the animals can continue living quietly undisturbed. This adds an extra tension to the story, since it's told with hushed protectiveness. And as they watch the wild animals, the secrecy makes them seem even more special.

Part of the magic comes from the book's illustrations, which are realistic with cool, peaceful colors. Illustrator Ted Rand chose a careful color scheme, using dull grays for the city and its highway. There's brick buildings, a concrete aqueduct, and a brown sun in the soot-filled sky. But when the secret place is discovered there's blue water, and a beautiful egret flapping its wings in the sunlight.

Author Eve Bunting even dedicated the book to her talented illustrator ("with admiration and affection"). He draws a convincing possum family, and a proud mallard duck that's swimming along with its ducklings. The author and the illustrator work together to reveal the lives of the animals in the city's hidden marsh. But it's up to Bunting's story to explain its significance.

The narrator is a little boy whose father "works a forklift" at one of the warehouses. But he also has a friend named Peter who likes watching birds with binoculars.  Peter says the mallard nested last year, laying eggs that hatched into ducklings. The narrator is excited that the birds might nest again!

But I like how the story stays true to the perspective of its young narrator. "Peter is like a bird himself," the boy observes, "with hair the color of a cinnamon teal." The boy lists out the noises he hears in the city - the growl of traffic, the snort of trains, and the beeping sounds from a backing truck. But the secret place has its own set of sounds - "the cackle of coots, the quack of teals, the rah-rah of the mallards that ring the sky."

It paints a dark picture of the cityscapes, with its windows "blinded by dust and names paint-scrawled on their brick walls... Smokestacks block clouds to dim the sun." But it does seem like a genuinely wonderful moment when Peter and his wife visit the marsh on a quiet evening, to discover the ducks sleeping, while other nocturnal animals slip up to the shadow-y night water.
"Before the city grew there was wilderness," Pete's wife explains.

"This is all that's left."

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