OUR LITTLE INVENTOR

A young girl is determined to help the people in a land plagued by pollution.

Lush, atmospheric paintings show Nell, a little inventor from the Cheng family, loading up her plant-powered breathing machine to bring to the city. Wearing her simple Chinese-style peasant’s clothing and a breathing mask, Nell finds herself in a oppressively polluted Dickensian city complete with dandies in top hats, women wearing high-necked gowns, and street urchins. Inside an imposing building shrouded in gray, she presents her invention to the “people in charge,” a group of White men in suits huddled in a dark, wood-paneled hall. They are not interested in her machine. Nell returns home, dejected but determined, having received encouragement from Mrs. Li, who works in the men’s building. Nell builds a bigger, better machine and heads back to the city. Unfortunately, Ng’s serviceable text is unequal to the masterful and evocative artwork, which uses both large spreads and small panels to convey the breadth of the setting and the details of the story. Every page is saturated with visual subtext, such as class and cultural differences and the patriarchal structure. There is so much this parable could have conveyed with some follow-through, but the book abruptly ends in the middle of the climax, leaving readers quizzically looking for more pages and scratching their heads in disappointment. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.5-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 43.9% of actual size.)

Despite masterful visual storytelling, this environmental and societal parable ultimately falls short.