The Soap Lady by Renee French
Top Shelf Productions: 2001
One morning ...
... a lady, made entirely of soap, walked out of Snowflake Bay...
... and onto the shore of a town called Blinkerton.
This begins one of the most unusual and haunting stories I've ever read. The Soap Lady is a children’s novel with pictures, or a picture book for adults or perhaps a “sophisticated picture book”...it's hard to define, but I know you'll like it.
The Soap Lady is a silent skeletal figure made entirely of soap, with a face kind of like a cross between a grey alien and a human skull without the lower jaw. Despite her fearsome visage she is very gentle and lovely and is constantly surrounded by little sheep-moths.
Rollo is a little boy who just cannot stay clean. His mother tells him that if he stays clean for one week she will buy him the ventriloquist's dummy he's always wanted ... but of course he gets dirty, and the Soap Lady finds him sitting in a pile of sludge crying. Desperate to help him, the Soap Lady cleans him till he sparkles, and so their strange and special friendship begins.
The art of Renee French is very soft and dream-like. Her human characters all have enormous eyes, and have a sweetly melancholic feel about them. Rollo's town is framed by far off cottontop trees, soft grey hills and of course the unfathomable bay. The illustrations are done in shades of sleepy pencil grey.
Despite all the softness The Soap Lady is not cutesy at all, and I think this is thanks to all the little details that generate the slightly askew reality forming the backdrop of the story. For example Rollo wants - not a teddy or a toy - but a creepy ventriloquist's dummy; and then there's a bath scene where Rollo ends up with a soapy spiky hairdo reminiscent of the crown belonging to Max in the definitely not cutesy Where The Wild Things Are . French's world is populated by sheep, bunnies and sea serpents.
Ultimately the townsfolk don't understand what the Soap Lady is all about, and seeing her only as an ugly alien, they tear the two friends apart – a metaphor for intolerance? Don't worry, the story does not end dismally, but actually rather...softly....
Quite different from the rest of our stock, The Soap Lady is, as they say, “one for the whole family”.
MS 26/8/04