SMILE!
by Geraldine McCaughrean
Yearling/Random House
Hardcover: 0375836403
Paperback: 9780440239529
Ages 7-10
128 pages

Norah Piehl Geraldine McCaughrean's hugely enjoyable novel SMILE! starts off with a bang --- or a crash. A plane crash, that is, as the photographer known as Flash falls from the sky, his life flashing by like the photographs he takes: "There were pictures of the Past and pictures of the Future, too --- all the things he had meant to do and now never would."

Flash does survive the crash, however, and is soon discovered by a group of villagers who inhabit a remote island. At first, the islanders are deeply suspicious of Flash, and particularly of the strange contraption he carries around his neck. It's a Polaroid camera, Flash's only camera that escaped the crash, and it has just 10 prints remaining.

The camera's flash terrifies the villagers, but they quickly grow excited when they see the image that gradually emerges from the print: a photo of the two children who are Flash's first friends in the village. "The forever children, the instant work of art, the mirage that had somehow set hard and been peeled off the air" --- this is how the islanders view Flash's remarkable photo.

Flash is faced with a challenge: how best to use his nine remaining photographs. The villagers bring Flash their most prized possessions --- their one cow, their most beautiful woman, their most powerful warriors --- each of which brings Flash another set of challenges, and another source of wonder. Despite his jaded, modern attitude, Flash soon sees his photography as the phenomenon it is: "Ever since childhood it had held him in its spell. A photograph can stop time. It can capture Now like a snowflake and keep it from melting away. It is a Memory pasted onto cardboard."

As Flash lives among these primitive peoples and grows to appreciate their culture (including both their homemade liquor and their intricate rock paintings), he grows obsessed with returning, with bringing back real photographic equipment to record the islanders with the detail and care they deserve. But when the time for Flash's return to civilization finally arrives, he is faced with the biggest mystery of all. Is there more magic on the island than what is contained in his cheap Polaroid camera?

Geraldine McCaughrean's SMILE! is a small treasure of a book, each carefully crafted chapter as precious as those 10 valuable photographs, which are actually reproduced as humorous, touchingly detailed cartoon illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. Through these vignettes, readers catch glimpses of the village and of Flash's growing fondness for these people and their way of life. The result is a sort of fable, about friendship, about cross-cultural understanding and about the value of looking at our lives through someone else's eyes --- or camera lens.

   --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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