First, let's look at the cover:
This book won the Most Popular Picture Book of the Year at the International Children's Book Fair in Bologna, Italy; it was selected for the Taipei County Full Star Reading Program.
The author has created such a small town: a small town where nothing is special, and then again, it is very special. The small town is full of flowers, vibrant flowers blooming everywhere, flowing with the colorfulness and fragrance of the flowers; flowers on the balcony windows of every house and on the roads. Even the gas station - a place reminiscent of the annoying smell of gasoline and abandoned cars - is filled with flowers. The residents of the City of Flowers have warmed and beautified the cold industrial civilization with flowers, and have allowed butterflies, the sprites of flowers, to flutter in their dreams and splendor their hearts .
Unexpectedly, the authoritarian mayor ordered all the flowers in the city to be cleared on the grounds that they prevented the citizens from actively engaging in construction and learning, and that he denied the values and meanings that "flowers" bring - beauty, joy, vitality, and hope. The mayor's pragmatism allows him to see only the superficial results of construction, and he arbitrarily incarcerates flowers and butterflies in the "tomb of dreams". Without the nourishment of flowers, the life of the people in the small town becomes dark and gloomy. People are in a hurry every day, thinking only about their work, without pursuits and dreams. From here, the picture becomes grey and colorless, just as the hearts of the people in the small town are grey and depressed, and there is no more laughter.
"It's so boring to live here!" The children spoke from the heart of all the residents. "We have to think of something." The pursuit of freedom and joy can't be stopped. The children found the "tomb of beautiful dreams" and opened the closed door, the wind and rain blew the flowers and trees back to the small town, and the city of flowers came back to life, with people singing and dancing, and the joyful and celebratory images came back.
Do we, too, have utilitarian ideas like the mayor and deprive our children of their butterfly dreams in an authoritarian manner like the mayor? Years of experience and experience, let us more pursuit of some material things, but for the inner world but choose to forget, choose to bury. But for children, their world is colorful, a piece of paper, a flower may be a world. But we adults deprive them of their world of flowers on the grounds that it is "useless" and "a waste of time". The flashy world, impetuous us, always to our standards to require children: do too slow, on the dead rush rush; do not do a good job, or scolding or complaining; do not do the right thing, and even scolding plus body. Have we forgotten that letting the child grow up happily is the fundamental and basic goal and pursuit? Love children should accept his all, tolerate him all.
Not forgetting the original intention, always. The dream is always there, the hope is unlimited.
Related Reviews:
*Once we see City of Flowers, our eyes are first attracted by the colorful butterfly on the cover. Painter Stefan? Chagur used transparent watercolors to paint circles and rectangles of all sizes, those geometric shapes in red, pink, yellow and blue, blooming like fireworks in the night sky. Under the hazy moonlight, the night in the small town took on a dreamlike air in the subtly changing blues ...... Turning the inside page, a small town full of flowers appeared - in the park, by the bridge, outside the attic, on the window sill, on the roof of the car, and by the side of the road, full of flowers of all colors and attracting butterflies that fluttered everywhere. When the mayor convicts the flowers and butterflies, Chagall appropriately paints the lifeless streets in gray, black, and brown. When the children find the "tomb of dreams", open the closed door, the wind and rain blew the flowers and trees back to the town, like a colorful clouds descending, then the artist with bright orange-red tones outlined the people in the square singing and dancing in the festive scene. Finally, the picture of five colorful butterflies flying in the blue night sky, flowers in full bloom, constituting a colorful picture of the city of flowers, and the cover.
* Although City of Flowers is a fairy tale, it is not difficult to find mayor-type characters around us, whose utilitarian concepts oppress the free pursuit of dreams in the human heart. Through City of Flowers, the author and the artist remind people that they should not be afraid to dream. When the world becomes gray and desperate, let imagination and creativity solve problems and tide over difficulties. As long as there is a dream in your heart, as long as you persist, you can let your dream open up infinite possibilities in your life!
* In life, we do a thing always go straight to the goal, put all the experience on the valuable, meaningful things, that what is "useful" and what is "useless"? And what criteria do we use to judge it? Author Efraim Haslaw's "City of Flowers" takes us on a journey to ponder this question.
In the eyes of the mayor, taller buildings and bigger factories are the meaningful things. In fact, what the mayor sees is the benefit, and it is the benefit that the eyes see, the tall buildings are the witnesses of the development of the times, and the big factories are the outward manifestation of the economic system, which can bring us the immediate benefit. It's as if we send our children to cram schools in order to improve their grades quickly. But what about the things behind the grades? For these let the child lose the beauty of life, for some of these let the villagers only think of work, work, work, all day long in the black cloth covered sleep, for some of these let the child lose the laughter?
The story of "City of Flowers" reminds us that there are still too many things in the world that are far more worthy of our cherishing and loving than cold machines, especially everything in nature, which may seem bland and uninteresting, but often bring comfort and abundance to the soul.