One Can

Written by Lana Button and Eric Walters

Illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant

Groundwood Books

978-1-773067346

32 pp.

Ages 3–6

September 2025 

 

For many Canadian public schools, yesterday was the first day of the 2025-2026 academic year. That first day of school brings such promise. It's usually a fresh start with a promise for better and more opportunities for...everything. But for too many children, that hope may be limited, even if they don't know it. For the child in Lana Button and Eric Walters's first picture book collaboration, illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant, those limitations do not curb their generosity and compassion.

From One Can, written by Lana Button and Eric Walters, illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant

Knowing that their class is collecting canned food for a food drive, a child grabs the lone can of Zoodelicious from an almost-bare pantry. Knowing it's their favourite, the child hopes it is that for someone else too. In class, the students place their donated cans on a 100-place carpet, with the child placing the Zoodelicious on the number 100, earning their can a snowflake sticker.

From One Can, written by Lana Button and Eric Walters, illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant

Things take an unexpected turn when Mom returns with groceries a few days later and his Zoodelicious can has a snowflake sticker on it. For the first time, the child recognizes that their family may be one of those in need that they were trying to help at school. A frank discussion between mother and child helps them understand better and even how to pay it forward with some much-loved mittens. 

From One Can, written by Lana Button and Eric Walters, illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant

While there are too many adults who think that picture books are frivolous stories aimed for our youngest readers, One Can will surely remind them of the power of storytelling to present deep issues that are also commonplace. There is no frivolousness to this story. Instead, Lana Button and Eric Walters have given us a lovely story of sharing, reciprocity, need, and compassion, all told from the perspective of a young child. What is most surprising is that the child does not even recognize their family as a needy one until they see the snowflake sticker on the Zoodelicious and realizes where their mother must have gotten those groceries. Before then, they had what they needed, probably because their mother worked hard to ensure that they did. Not surprisingly, when their mother reveals their circumstances, the child thinks only of the other 99 families who would still need food and more. 

 

This could have been a very heavy story. Poverty and food insecurity are serious issues. Even as food and clothing drives become common practices throughout the year, and children such as this one are provided regularly with school lunches, here by their own teacher, the silence and secrecy and even shame are resounding. I'm so pleased that Lana Button and Eric Walters avoided those negatives with much sensitivity. The child is not ashamed to look at the school's Mitten Tree–where donated mittens and winter accessories are displayed for gifting–and doesn't hide the macaroni given by the teacher for lunch. Illustrator Isabelle Malenfant matches that powerful but tasteful approach to their story. Isabelle Malenfant, who similarly gave a softness of touch to Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress and Pinny in Summer, keeps her palest colours for the child's home and the boldest for outside. Their poverty creates a veil over their life, though outside of the home and at school, the child is seen as vibrant as everyone else. In addition to the colours of her digital illustrations, Isabelle Malenfant uses perspective to juxtapose the child against two different worlds, one of limited resources and another where there is more. It gives the reader more context for this child's reality and even enhances our understanding of why they are able to extend generosity and compassion to others.

Lana Button's picture books like Tough Like Mum and Willow Finds a Way have always spoken to young children and what they might experience at school and home. And Eric Walters never shies away from tough issues like poverty in The King of Jam Sandwiches or COVID-19 in Don't Stand So Close to Me or incarceration, bullying, discrimination and more. Together these writers have approached the reality of many children, and instead of focusing on any limitations these children experience, they highlight how children can extend compassion and generosity to others. It seems one can, whether that of Zoodelicious or the picture book, can make a difference.

 • • • • • • •

 

Please consider joining author Lana Button 

 

at 

 

A Different Drummer Books 

513 Locust St., Burlington, Ontario

905-639-0925 

 

for the launch of One Can 

 

on 

 

Sunday, September 7, 2025 

1 PM

 

If you're able, please bring a can of food for FeedHalton.  

 

Pinny in Summer

by Joanne Schwartz

Illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant

Groundwood Books

978-1-55498-782-5

32 pp.

Ages 4-7

May 2016

Pinny in Summer is as delicate as a summer breeze and as subtle as sun-bleached driftwood, yet mighty in its four-chaptered summer day adventures.

Joanne Schwartz has eloquently written Pinny in Summer as an early reader, with lengthier texts all the better for exploring Pinny’s motivations and actions.  In Pinny, the first chapter, Pinny makes looking for a wishing rock into an exploration for all the senses, feeling the warmth, enjoying the natural world’s colours and shapes, and listening to the squawking birds.  In Cloud Watching, Pinny is on her way home when she encounters friends Annie and Lou who invite her to go blueberry picking. Before they reach Blueberry Hill, they partake in some imaginative cloud watching, fortunately as the  skies open up and the rains fall just after their berry-picking.

Curling up at home to read a book and dry off, Pinny is visited by a large seagull in the chapter titled The Seagull.  Communicating with her by delicate head movements, the seagull engages the little girl in the most subtle of tête-à-têtes.  Finally, in the culminating chapter Pinny Has a Party, all the wonderful elements of Pinny’s summer day are brought together.  Having made her blueberry cake for her friends and deposited it on the picnic table outside, her seagull returns to indulge in the sweet treat, leaving a little gift as a thank-you. But Pinny sees these circumstances as just a beginning for another ideal summer day.

From Pinny in Summer by Joanne Schwartz, 

illus. by Isabelle Malenfant

Joanne Schwartz, who co-wrote Grandmother Ptarmigan (Inhabit Media, 2013) with Qaunaq Mikkigak, gets the promise of summer spot-on with text that reflects Pinny’s wide-eyed wholesomeness and wonder at everything she experiences. Isabelle Malenfant’s illustrations echo those sentiments exactly.  Isabelle Malenfant, who illustrated the highly-acclaimed Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (by Christine Baldacchino, Groundwood Books, 2014), has a breeziness to her artwork: the colours are gauzy, as if bleached by the sun or seen through a fluttering sheer curtain, and her lines and shapes are as ephemeral as shimmering waves.  Pinny is Summer is a book of summer for every and any summer.

Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress

by Christine Baldacchino

Illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant
Groundwood Books
978-1-55498-347-6
32 pp.
Ages 4-7
For release May 2014

It's not surprising that Morris Micklewhite loves the colour tangerine.  It reminds him of his mother's beautiful long hair, the brilliance of the sun, and the richness of a tiger's coat.  And, with the soul of an artist, he is drawn to painting, puzzles, singing, and imaginative play.  When he finds a tangerine dress in the dress-up center at school, Morris puts together an experience for all his creative senses.  A dress of warm tangerine, of swishes and crinkles, that he pairs with different shoes, but especially the ones that click, click, click.  But not everyone appreciates Morris' selection and, though he tries to ignore his peers' words, he is troubled by what he hears and how both the girls and boys exclude him.

Predictably, Morris wants to stay home.  Pretending he has a stomachache, Morris is hopeful of missing school, the place he likes to do so many things.  But,

"When he thought of all the kids in his class
and all the means things they did and said,
his tummy ached for real." (pg. 14)

Delighted to have the time to hang out with the cat, Moo, and read about elephants, Morris starts to feel better, even finding a way ultimately be accepted by the other children and still be true to himself.

Christine Baldacchino strikes the right tone for recognizing how one's differences may be appreciated or not.  She could have played up the gender issue, what boys do and what girls do, but it's much more about just being different and still being true to yourself.  Being different can be such a hardship for many children.  Without recognizing that we are all different, and should be proudly so, many of us just want to fit in, and fitting in often takes the path of conformity.  Morris Micklewhite is no different than other children but he finds a way to embrace his individuality and creativity and share it with others successfully.  There's a lovely fluidity to Isabelle Malenfant's illustrations, undoubtedly due to her responsive use of charcoal, watercolour and pastels, which has already garnered her the 2013 Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize.  With a very simple message dressed in hues of tangerine and the clap, clap, clap of applause, Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress will serve to help those whose imaginations may be haltered or those who cannot accept anything beyond life's typical scenarios. 


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A book trailer uploaded recently by the House of Anansi is available on YouTube and at our book trailers' site here.