Joao by a Thread

This lyrical and visually intriguing picturebook explores the shadowy, existential world between waking and sleeping, and celebrates our right to think freely, question and create.

‘Where’s it hiding, the night that kisses Joao? In the strands of a lullaby? Fluttering in the wind?’

Joao is snug in bed where sleep beckons, and as he tumbles headlong into the pattern on his blanket, his adventures among its woven images become increasingly surreal. Grappling with a worrying hole that grows and grows, Joao discovers that his blanket is unravelling into threads – and ultimately, words – that gleam like moonlight against the saturated red and black of the pages. But all is not lost. Using a question mark as a needle, Joao sews the words together to make himself another blanket, and peaceful sleep is possible at last.

From the very first spread, our attention is captured by the lacy white pattern of the blanket flowing on into the book, and we barely notice the boy tucked up in bed. Later, Joao’s lanky silhouette takes centre stage and is remarkably expressive. ‘Mello draws like a shapeshifter’, says his publisher, and the more we look, the more the apparent simplicity of his artwork becomes richer and more complex. Traditional motifs are transformed before our eyes: fish, boats, shells and other objects grow and shrink within the patterns, and Joao’s interactions with them become increasingly surreal.

Mello’s sensitively-translated text is also spare and dreamlike. Questioning and suggesting, it evokes the disorienting nature of sleep in a verbal dance that leads and responds to the images on every spread. Readers able to meet his “poetic and bewildered language” with curiosity and confidence will be rewarded: this is a book to fire imaginations and prompt creative explorations and responses. But it does require audiences to suspend expectations and enter a world where questions must be asked – and many are left unanswered – so may deter some readers.

In Joao by a Thread, Mello acknowledges and explores the loneliness and anxiety we all experience in our sleep (‘How do you stop a hole that doesn’t stop?’) and there’s nothing cosy or predictable about reading it. But text and pictures work together to offer an intriguing and unthreatening way to confront this essential unease and celebrate the independence, curiosity and creative spark it brings.

Roger Mello is an award-winning Brazilian illustrator with more than a hundred titles to his name, twenty-two of which he also wrote. This book was dedicated to children on the Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca, where weaving has a long and distinguished history, and in a moving afterword, Mello talks about growing up under an authoritarian regime in which people had to search for missing relatives and could be arrested for owning the wrong book. ‘So I decided to make my own blanket of scattered letters,’ he explains. ‘From animal tales to contemporary arts, I pulled on the thread that connects today’s books to an ancient tradition. Just like the first piece of fabric that sheltered a sleeping child on Lake Titicaca.’

Read the BfK Authorgraph interview with Roger Mello