Blueberries for Sal

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Blueberries for Sal (1948) is a children's picture book by Caldecott Medal-winning author Robert McCloskey.

The book deals with Little Sal, who is going blueberry picking with her mother. The story is of a little girl Sal and her mother as they go out into the country to pick blueberries for winter, and a bear and his mother as they go to eat berries for winter from the other side of the same hill. Set in a small town in Maine this picture book piece that uses a single dark blue color and block printing for the illustrations.

Sal also appears in McCloskey's One Morning in Maine. It is said that Sal and Sal's mother are modeled after McCloskey's wife, Margaret, and daughter, Sarah.

"The book opens and closes with a picture of little Sal and her mother in the kitchen, the mother is canning blueberries. This very domestic opening is typical of the warmth of McCloskey who loved life, life for living as much as anything else. Ones sees in this opening picture Sal entertaining herself by placing the canning rings on her wrist and a spoon. A simple childlike act which helps to set the stage for Sal's obvious child actions throughout the books. This is not to be the overly diligent or angelic girl of so many other books, Sal is a real child figure. She gets into mischief and causes her mom no end of trouble.”^[1]

The book uses a number of visual narrative (illustration) techniques as will as verbal techniques to draw parallels between and at the same time contrast the bear and the human families. Both families are set in similar compositions, but they head in opposite directions when they reach the blueberry patch. Some of the verbal interplay that matches and contrasts the two occurs when Sal’s Mother tells her that they can’t eat all the berries because they need to save them for winter, and the bear mother tells her child to eat as much as it can to store up for winter. Both families are storing food for the winter, but in very different ways, and the bear's is much easier for children to follow. Sal soon wonders off to eat.

It is at this point that Sal and the bear cub get mixed up and follow after the wrong mother. It takes the mothers several minutes to realize they're being followed by the wrong child; it isn't until the bear cub tries to eat from Sal's mother's bucket and the mother bear hears the "plink plank plunk" sound of Sal dropping blueberries into her bucket that they find out what has happened. Needless to say, the two mothers are extremely surprised.

Ultimately each child is reunited with its proper mother and they both leave the hill. Just before leaving Sal drops a blueberry into her still empty bucket.

Blueberries for Sal won the Caldecott Honor citation.