When author Bruce Handy’s son Isaac was about four years old, he loved and lost an orange balloon. “He’d been upset,” the older Handy remembers, “and he had promised to himself one day if he ever got a pet, he would name it Balloon, in honor of this balloon that he lost.”
Six months later, Isaac and his sister got kittens. “And he did it,” says Handy. His sister named her cat S’morze and Isaac named his cat Balloon. Handy was so moved by his son’s loyalty to an inanimate object that he decided to write a children’s book about it.
Balloon — the book — is about a little boy who is in the park with his mom and a beautiful, bright orange balloon. When he walks into a flock of pigeons, they startle him and he accidentally lets go. The balloon flies up, up, up and away.
Julie Kwon illustrated Balloon — a mostly wordless picture book. “With all respect to Bruce,” Kwon laughs, “it’s definitely harder when there’s no words.” Though they clarify that Handy did provide notes. “It was very descriptive,” Kwon adds. Handy gabe her descriptions of what he was imagining, how the book would look, and how it would all play out. “That was all very helpful,” she says.
Kwon illustrated the book with pen and ink. “I really tried to not use orange in anything except the things that were meant to be orange,” she explains. “I tried not to use any, like, orange-adjacent colors too much. There’s not a lot of red in this book, for example, because I didn’t want that to conflict with the orange.” She also had to make sure that she chose the right shade of orange. “It’s got to be one of like, the strongest, most pure oranges you can get,” Kwon says.
After the little boy loses his balloon, he sees round orange objects everywhere he looks — is that his balloon? No — it’s just a lollipop, a frisbee, a basketball. “Julie did a great job inserting orange objects throughout this book to torture this poor little boy,” says Handy. The kid’s despair grows until…
He explodes. “There’s one page which I think, yeah, in the process we referred to it as the ‘crazy page,'” says Handy. “I can’t even remember what the note was, probably something like, ‘everywhere he looks, he sees orange, orange, it’s just like an explosion of orange.'” Handy says it’s his favorite spread.
“I really enjoyed drawing that,” adds Kwon. “The illustrations, you know, they take on so much more responsibility in a way. In a classic book… you do have the text to communicate.” It made Kwon think — “What can an image communicate at the end of the day, you know, what else can we put in here to make things more interesting for the reader?”
Losing a balloon is, of course, one of the most universal childhood experiences. It’s why it’s so easy to relate to the little boy in this story, says author Bruce Handy. “”You invest these things with meaning or life or something,” he says. And illustrator Julie Kwon agrees. “I would get so sentimentally attached to just basically garbage,” she remembers about her childhood self. “I’d find like, a rock that I just liked the shape of and I’d want to like, hold the rock with me.”
Careful readers will catch a glimpse of the little boy’s balloon later in the story. The last orange illustration, though, is of the boy’s new friend, who he names Balloon. “Hopefully it is reassuring to kids,” says Handy. “I think that there’s real emotion there. And I think it’s important to honor that emotion.”
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