Book Report: Olivia

“Olivia” by Ian Falconer is a wonderful, simply told introduction to the world of a little piglet named Olivia. Olivia lives with her mother, her father, her younger brother Ian, her cat, and her dog. She is a strongly imaginative child, and loves to play. It’s really as simple as that, and therein lies its strength.

The reader is taken along to see how Olivia spends her day, from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night. She has her morning rituals, such as brushing her ears and moving the cat, and must try on every piece of clothing she owns before finally getting dressed to go out.

There is a wonderful sparseness to the artwork, which uses the negative space very well, making every drawn element stand out ever more strongly. The color palette is similarly restrained, using only black, white, and red to flesh out the shapes, with mild grey to shade contours.

There is a lovely bit where Olivia goes to the museum and gets to look at her favorite painting, which is a piece by Edgar Degas, and a painting she just doesn’t get, by Jackson Pollock. There is a cultured element to Olivia that’s refreshing — the book that her mother reads to her at bedtime is about opera star Maria Callas. These things are never mentioned outright, they’re just there for the reader to enjoy.

All in all, “Olivia” is a portrait of every child, with her likes and dislikes, full of love and her own temperament, and every child will find a bit of themselves in her.