Customer Reviews

Oregon'S Journey - Pbk (Trade)

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Spectcular text language, heartfelt, and friendship at its finest! The illustrations are beautiful. Duke and Oregon will steal your heart if the illustrations don't do it first! A teacher from Michigan.

I have two kids; I must have read this book a million and one times. It is by far my favorite kids book of all time. The more times I read it the deeper the meaning appears to be. My interpretation of the story is that it is a parallel to the human search for truth and the steps to finding it. Or maybe it is just that I am finding truth in my life and by coincidence, Rascal hints at some of the steps I needed.
The give away for me was the last line, "I walked into the white morning, light at heart and happy."

Duke, a clown, realizes that his friend Oregon the bear needs to be free and so they set off on a roadtrip across America to the forested mountain regions of Oregon. Books as beautiful and evocative as this one are rare. The story is told simply, with an economy of style and capturing a wide range of nuance with very few words. It is a story of captivity and freedom, of prejudice and longing, a story of America and its diversity, both geographical and cultural. All of these messages come across in a story told to be delightful to children and poignant for their parents.

The pictures complement the story perfectly. One of my favorite pictures (it is hard to pick) depicts Duke sitting on a motel bed while Oregon is surrounded with cheeseburgers -- many of them merely sketched to suggest the passage of time (and the consumption of burgers).