James Kwan

If you were a boat, how would you feel? What would it be like to contain twisting corridors in your insides, and to have many different passengers - each with a different set of priorities - inside your belly? And what would happen if the passengers to whom you played host began to quarrel, leading you to crash on some sharp rocks? Would you ever be whole again...?

Author/artist James Kwan, who made his picture-book debut with Dear Yeti, returns to the form in this second title, inviting the reader to consider life as a boat. No doubt intended as an allegory for the human condition - the ways we are pulled in different directions by our various and conflicting impulses, desires, and loyalties - How It Feels To Be a Boat is not entirely successful in my view, precisely because the allegory is so overt ("you are a boat," the narrator declares forcefully at the beginning of the book), but so unconvincing. Does one feel like a boat? The illustrations here, done in pencil and watercolor, and then enhanced digitally, are appealing, but not charming enough to compensate for a rather muddled text. Not sure to whom I'd recommend this one, assuming I'd recommend it at all...… (lisätietoja)