Award-winning author Matt de la Peña never shies away from exploring the impressionability, vulnerability, and search for belonging found in young, working class protagonists of color (see: Last Stop on Market Street, Milo Imagines the World, Love, and more at Penguin Random House publishing). In a new collaboration with Colombian illustrator Paola Escobar, de la Peña’s latest picture book engages young readers in early contemplation of the value systems that construct their world. The Perfect Place pushes back against narratives that reinforce the ideal as the norm. Instead, de la Peña and Escobar ask us to consider: “what’s so great about being perfect, anyway?”
The Perfect Place centers around Lucas, a young Latine boy who attends a prestigious school and who one day receives the perfect score on his robot report. Lucas’ excitement over his perfect grade is quickly dampened by not-so-perfect realities outside of school: his father’s old truck stalls and requires pushing in front of the entire school, the electricity is shut off again when they get home, and his mother barely has time to greet him before dashing off to work the night shift. It’s tragic to see Lucas repeatedly unable to gain the validation he yearns for, and the home space of his family’s cramped apartment and the old, worn down neighborhood they live in feel too dim, too constrained in comparison to the brightly-lit luxury of Lucas’ fancy school.
Later that night, a strange light shines into the room that Lucas shares with his baby sister. He can’t help but follow the light outside. He wanders away from his family and his community until he steps across a golden, gated threshold to “the place where the perfect people lived.” Here Lucas is celebrated for his perfect robot report and all the perfect things he has ever done, and finally he feels the “sense of belonging” in this perfect place, with perfect people, doing perfect things.
If de la Peña’s prose is poignant and peppered with rich descriptions of the world as seen and felt through Lucas, then Escobar’s illustrations supply a kind of vivid imagery that lets readers speculate additional details that Lucas himself does not fully, consciously register. Lucas’ abuelo is explicitly described singing sad songs on his ukulele, and a small gray photograph of a woman in a small section of the same page visually hints toward a deceased wife.
Lucas’ mother, Aunt Rosa, Baby Gabi, and Lucas himself have curly, thick, densely textured hair unlike his father and grandfather, which offers different ideas of what Latinidad might look like across multiple generations.
If de la Peña’s prose is poignant and peppered with rich descriptions of the world as seen and felt through Lucas, then Escobar’s illustrations supply a kind of vivid imagery that lets readers speculate additional details that Lucas himself does not fully, consciously register.
De la Peña and Escobar also deftly play with light and dark to visualize the young protagonist’s internal struggle. The perfect place, like Lucas’ school, is bright and colorful with copious amounts of negative space on the page, not unlike the most picturesque, gentrified town squares in America. Here, Lucas experiences a “glorious morning” and stands in awe at the “beautiful cars… beautiful smiles… beautiful words.” There are lavish fountains and big arches, Seuss-ical trees that are cloudlike in texture, and posh, cheerful residents who just so happen to resemble the students, families, and faculty from Lucas’ perfect school. Lucas himself is seen laughing and waving his arms in the air for the first time. It’s a jarring contrast to the predominantly dark blue hues of Lucas’ family’s small, unlit apartment, where the paint is peeling off the walls and the orange juice stains just won’t come off the rug.
When a boy who looks just like Lucas spills orange juice and promptly gets exiled from the perfect place, de la Peña’s story takes a darker turn. The mayor of the perfect place publicly condemns the exiled boy, describing him as “a thief in the night” whose mistake has deeply harmed their perfect world. A cleaning crew immediately arrives to erase the spilled juice, and Escobar’s choice to portray this moment as a taped-off crime scene while surrounding residents weep is equal parts parodic and unsettling; it’s casual criminalization of a young brown boy by an entire community.
As the “real” Lucas watches events unfold, readers can observe the paradigm shift in the boy’s desire for perfection. What, indeed, is so great about perfection when even a utopian society of supposedly flawless people becomes dystopic and discriminatory in its pursuit? At this point, I recall Lucas’ abuelo’s words advice from earlier in the story: “We are taught, mijo, to search only for happiness. But on certain nights, I prefer the right kind of unhappiness.” In hindsight, this advice makes all the sense in the world; readers, young and old alike, are gently reminded that there is a full scope of human experience throughout the course of our lifetimes, and to strive towards only one aspect of it (perfection, in Lucas’ case) is to miss out on all the rest.
When Lucas smells chorizo cooking and hears a crying baby and a ukulele, he willingly runs out of the perfect place and back to the imperfect place he calls home. He wakes up to his family gathered around him, celebrating his robot report all together. Ultimately, Lucas realizes that the various spaces that he inhabits in his daily life are neither better nor worse from one another, just different. It is that difference that makes his world variegated and textured and, arguably, primes readers towards topics about family, class, race, achievement, and what it takes for children of color to feel like they belong.
The Perfect Place will make a fine addition for young audiences with anxieties at the beginning of the new school year, and an even finer one for families looking to children’s fiction for entry points into complex conversations about the world they live in.
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