Patricia Polacco
Patricia Polacco is an author.
Polacco could not read. She got through her school years hiding it, was teased for it, and was well into that stretch before a teacher recognised what was actually happening and taught her; the picture book Thank You, Mr. Falker is her account of that. Art was the thing she could do while words refused to behave, and she works as her own illustrator, which is why her pictures carry as much of the story as her sentences do.
Two subjects come back over and over. One is inherited family memory: a quilt passed down through generations of immigrant women, a rotten older brother, a father remembered in fragments, a grandmother out of Russian folklore who is scarier and warmer than the version in the picture-book tradition. She writes those as if she is transcribing rather than inventing, and the specificity is what keeps them off the greeting-card shelf.
The other subject is teachers, who turn up in book after book, which is not mysterious given how her own reading finally started. She has made a long career out of the moment when an adult notices a child properly. That is a narrow seam, and she has mined it further than anyone else in the form.
Books (10)
Where to start with Patricia Polacco
The place to begin is The keeping quilt, the clearest example of what she does with family memory, a single object handed down until the story is about the handing down rather than the object.
Pink and Say is the book her readers press on other people, and it is considerably tougher than the format prepares you for. My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother and My ol' man are the warm, funny end of the same childhood material. Babushka Baba Yaga is her folklore register and the best-looking book of the set. For the teacher strand, The art of Miss Chew and Mr. Wayne's masterpiece are the ones that connect directly to her own story, and Aunt Chip and the great Triple Creek dam affair is the loudest argument for reading she ever made. In our mothers' house widens the family she keeps writing about.