by Moe Zilla

Created on: October 04, 2010

"Pushing and pedaling side by side,
eighty begin The Great Divide."

It's apparently a very difficult race that involves bicycles, rowboats, horses, and balloons. There's actually 40 tiny people at the first fork in the road - two treacherous canyons where half of the racers were all eliminated. (The word "Help!" appears 40 times in a speech balloon at the bottom of the page.) For the next drawing, there's now just twenty faces, smiling in three rows above the edge of a row boat as it pulls ahead of an identical boat that's falling far behind them in the distance.  

"Half are swept up in a dizzying whirl.
Half battle on through foam and swirl..."

The story's written as a short, driving rhyme, and accompanied by some very simple illustrations that were drawn with acrylic on modeling paste. Each picture shows half the contestants advancing - smiling moving towards the right side of the page - while the other half can often be glimpsed stranded in the background. They're busy drawings, showing a real effort to cram in all the small people. But they're drawn with more detail when the contest drops to just ten racers.

"Half stampede west to a muddy disgrace.
Half gallop east at a thunderous pace."

Tracy Mitchell draws an intriguing mix of people! There's a man with a curly moustache, and a woman dressed in purple with white hair and eyeglasses. There's a circus clown, and a young man wearing a bandana and an eyepatch. There's a cowboy, a woman who's wearing an orange boa, and even a female fireman. Whoops! By the end of the next page, half of them are gone - blown off in the wrong direction in their hot air balloons.

The book's author, Dayle Ann Dodds, is an elementary school teacher, according to the book's jacket.  She's earned a degree in early childhood development, and argues that rhymes, rhythms, and patterns are "natural to children's ears." I thought children might've enjoyed some more detailed drawings, but Publisher's Weekly noted the pictures were "well-organized." It's impressive the way Mitchell always includes exactly the right number of tiny people. (The book's complete title is "The Great Divide: A Mathematical Marathon.")

None of the characters really come to life, since the story's real star is that crazy race itself. There's a moment of excitement as the illustrator switches to a two-page picture of the silhouetted crowd, waiting under a banner that says "FINISH LINE!" Unfortunately, all four of the remaining races have already crashed into an unforeseen lake. It's surprisingly gratifying that the race is finally won - on the book's very last page - by one of the left-behind contestants.

They'd finally ignored all the book's arbitrary obstacles, and just rented themselves an airplane.

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