The Way Back Home

Jeffers’ third book about the boy and his space travels (following How to Catch a Star and Lost and Found) is perhaps his best. This is a story about friendship and helping one another out, told with a lightness of visual and verbal touch. It is a measure of Jeffers’ mastery of the picture book medium that it is not possible to effectively summarise the story in words, so much of the content being essentially visual. Many of the jokes and puns depend on such things as the interplay between a stylised representation of the moon and more traditional depictions of space. Jeffers’ stylised figures carry a surprising range of gestures and emotions and seem somehow to aid the process of suspension of disbelief. This is important when aeroplanes are found in the cupboard under the stairs and ropes are hung from the moon for the boy to climb.

Jeffers is particularly good with pathos, using scale brilliantly in passages such as the boy marooned in the void with his rapidly failing torch. His control of pace is excellent too, always knowing when a picture will say much more than words, such as the delightful image of the boy’s alien friend looking at his watch as he waits for the distracted boy to return. A delightful book by a maturing artist.