posted on 25 Jan 2024

Do You Remember? by Sydney Smith

When everything is changing around you and you’re feeling vulnerable and a little bit lost, it’s comforting to be able to fall back on shared memories with someone closest to you. And that’s precisely the theme of Syndney Smith’s beautiful and touching new picture book.

Canadian multi-award-winning illustrator and author, Smith has told an intimate story of a boy and his mother who have moved away from the places and people they know – including the boy’s father – and are now sharing their memories of when times felt better.

Lying in the dark on a shared bed with their heads close together, the question is asked:

“Do you remember…..”

As we turn the page, light floods in and we’re transported back to a summer’s day when the family enjoyed a picnic and ‘Those berries were so sweet!’

Then we’re back in the dark of the bedroom and the memories start again. This time it’s a favourite birthday when the boy got a new bike that he could barely control.

Other shared memories follow: a storm with thunder and lightning; the smell of an old oil lamp; and then, more traumatically, leaving home and arriving in the big, strange city.

Now it’s time to make new memories and this time spent remembering the past will become one of the very first they will recall in this new life they have to make.

This is a simple and gentle story about the power of memory and the way we can still share those special times in our lives even if we have to move on and start again in circumstances we might not choose.

The other stars of this book however are the wonderful illustrations. The book is big and generously sized, allowing the full and double-page illustrations to have their impact. The perspectives and viewing points of the pictures are often different and daring – we see the room through the boy’s eyes on occasions; the artist uses a telescopic eye to zoom right into the head and shoulders of mother and child lying on the bed.

Smith’s graphic style is realist and painterly – he appears to use a mix of gouache, pastels and watercolours to achieve his contrasts between the sharper, sun-drenched memories and the hazy, soft-focus of the boy and mother in their bed remembering in the dark.

This book would be a perfect one for adults and children to share if they are facing change and anxiety over the future – in the end you’ll have your favourite memories of the past but there will always be new ones to make in the future too.

Available from Walker Books, you should be able to get a copy from your local independent bookshop – who will be happy to order it for you if they don’t have copies on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

January 2024