by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 07, 2010

"Barn" is a wonderful collection of Americana, in both its illustrations and its text. It tells the story of the last 200 years - as told from the perspective of a country barn. "I was raised in a coastal fog so thick the crows had to walk to the cornfield that morning..." the barn remembers. "It took twenty men sawing, fitting, and lifting beams and a flock of women folk cooking food to raise me that day..."

"They sang songs about winning the Revolution..."

Illustrator Debby Atwell also composed the book's text, and she tries to imagine all the details that signal each moment in history. On the first page she remembers the Indian's name for the village, then notes the settlers had renamed it after a remembered town in England. 100 years fly by on a single page, and two more generations on the next. When the barn reaches the Great Depression, it remembers that homeless hoboes camped in a nearby field...

"Life was all around me," the barn remembers, as it stands quietly watching in the breeze from the Atlantic ocean.

It's Debby Atwell's first story, since previously she'd only illustrated two books written by her husband David. But her story falls into a natural rhythm. What happened after the Great Depression? A woman named Polly bought the farm at an auction, and converted the barn into an antique store. And when World War II arrives, the barn watches the family plant a victory garden, and stores the results of a scrap metal drive.

The pace is a little uneven, but there's even an illustration showing the 1960s, when Polly's granddaughter stages a peace rally against the war in Vietnam. "The people who came sang songs about peace and love," the barn remembers.  There's a yellow volkwagen in the illustration, decorated with flowers. There's two long-haired couples in the foreground - wearing cut-off jeans and big smiles - but most of the people are just indistinct figures in the watercolor's background.  

The book ends with a dramatic twist - which is just a little bit weird. The barn notes that its new owners don't know a lot about electrical wiring, and that one night they forgot to turn off the lights after a squirrel had chewed through the cables. "And there I was, on fire," the barn says, sounding a little bitter. "Nothing could stop it.

"I burned to the ground."

There's a strange happy ending coming, but it takes a while to get there.  "The last thing I recall before a big snow buried what was left of me was seeing Jill, Jack's daughter, heading out to the clothesline," the barn remembers. Then it watches as carpenters come "to rebuild me just exactly the way I was before the fire." In the last pages, Atwell seems to tack on a new dramatic storyline, since now the barn suddenly recognizes that "time have changed," and wondering "What good is a barn in the modern world?"  But in the end, the barn's used for storing horses, and "I got back the feeling of being a true barn."

And it remembers the Indian that had said the nearby pine trees would laugh in the breeze, and decides that it's ultimately true...

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