Lynn Reiser, author and illustrator,
The Lost Ball - La pelota perdida.
Greenwillow, 2002

Two boys circle the park with their dogs, one clockwise, one counterclockwise, each looking for a lost ball and trying to find the owner of the ball he's found. They almost meet halfway round, but the ice cream stand distracts them.

“Is this your ball?” one of the boys asks, holding up a green ball perfect for playing fetch with a dog. A pitcher calls out in the middle of his windup, “No, our ball is a baseball.” When the other boy, an orange ball in hand, encounters the same game on his way around the prk, someone has just cracked out a hit. “¿Es esta tu pelota?” he calls out. “No, nuestra pelota es una pelota de béisbol.”

The two boys don't find one another until they've traversed the entire 360 degrees, back to their starting point in the dog exercise area of the park. “Yo me llama Ricardo,” says the boy with the green baseball cap. “My name is Richard,” answers the boy with the orange cowboy hat. “¡Busca!” “Catch!”

While the visual and textul parallels in The Lost Ball / La pelota perdida make for a lively language lesson, the rewards of the book go much deeper than a Spanish-English vocabulary lesson. Lynn Reiser is working squarely within a picture book tradition in which such patterns have been known to work special magic, as in classics like Blueberries for Sal. This new book is remarkable for the way it combines an ingenious and carefully developed structure with a joyful take on the wacky, unpredictable world of physical play. While the book's structure is quite strict - every sentence is spoken both in Spanish and in English - the story is memorable for its humor, warmth, and realism. Line drawings with green and orange touches are punctuated by collaged photos of various colorful balls, including scoops of ice cream as well as balls for juggling, tennis, and miniature golf.

In spite of all the time it takes the boys to find one another, the two really do speak the same language in the end: the language of play. This isn't the first time author-illustrator Reiser has taken communication as her subject: her Best Friends Think Alike is an especially effective and entertaining look at obstacles and bridges to communication, and Margaret and Margarita / Margarita y Margaret is another clever melding of English and Spanish - and play. Richard's dog says “bark” and Ricardo's dog says “guau,” but of course the two understand one another wonderfully well.

Susan Marie Swanson
Fall 2002