Michele Lemieux
Kids Can Press, 1999
ISBN: 1550746928
240 pages
Age 8 and up
In January Magazine, illustrator/filmmaker Michele Lemieux says of her inventive and award-winning Stormy Night (1999), "Most of the drawings are directly from my sketchbooks...I wanted the doubt to show in my hand." Stormy Night began as Lemieux's fortieth birthday gift to herself, but the book appeals to readers and thinkers of any age and philosophical bent. Her simple pen and ink drawings are whimsical and surreal, the perfect complement to timeless questions of the nature of the universe, identity, and existence.
Stormy Night is no standard picture book, in both form and content. Physically, the book resembles a sketchbook. The handsomely bound hardcover is designed to lie flat when open; a child may easily keep the book open at a favourite page. The book tells the story of a girl, who, frightened by a nighttime storm, stays awake with her dog Fido asking deep and oft-unanswerable questions. "Is there life on other planets?" "Is there only one of me in the world?" In Lemieux's minimalist approach, a single illustration is usually placed opposite each idea, with some double page spreads depicting the storm outside. The tentative quality of Lemieux's drawings does not detract from the book's efficacy. Rather, the naïve images are well suited to the universality of the girl's questions; indeed, who has not been kept awake at night by such thoughts?
It is not necessary to read Stormy Night in a linear fashion. One may open the book at any page for an idea or an image to fire the imagination, or spark a revealing discussion. Thus, the book should have a longer shelf life than most picture books; after all, even a wizened reader can appreciate the book's more ineffable questions, such as "Will I know when it's time to die?" and "Will the world come to an end someday?"
Lemieux's greatest success with Stormy Night is how she renders an ordinary scenario and still more commonplace ideas into something provocative, yet oddly comforting. There are two worlds in Stormy Night: the lean, pristine pictures of the girl's fancy, and the wild pen and ink washes of the rainy night outside. The real world dictates the girl's thoughts and ideas--she gazes at the stars and thinks of infinity; a burst of lightning makes her think "of robbers, of wild beasts and monsters, and maniacs!" These fears lead her to ponder the future and other great unknowns. She imagines the afterlife as going through a hole in the sky. Lemieux's imagery is often conventional, like the undeveloped landscape of a child's imagination.
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