Do what you can. A new kids’ book shows how even ‘The Littlest Drop’ helps

Birds sing in the trees, monkeys swing from branch to branch, snakes slither below, and a hummingbird has just built her nest when, all of a sudden, fire breaks out.

The Littlest Drop is Sascha Alper’s debut children’s book, based on a parable from the indigenous Quechua people of South America. In Alper’s adaptation, all of the animals flee to the river — except the hummingbird, who goes to get one little drop of water, because that’s all she can carry.

At first, the other animals just watch and shake their heads. After some time, the elephant asks her what she’s doing. “You cannot put out that terrible fire,” he says. “You are just a small bird.” The hummingbird replies, “I am doing what I can.”

The Littlest Drop was one of the last picture books that Caldecott Medalist Jerry Pinkney worked on before he died.

“He’s just prolific, probably one of the most prolific children’s book illustrators that ever has been in America,” says his son, Brian Pinkney. After his father died in October 2021, the publisher asked if Brian, who is also a decorated illustrator, would take over the project.

“My first thought was, how am I going to do this? He was a master at doing animals. And I’ve done like maybe a couple of animals on a spread, but never like 20,” remembers Brian Pinkney. “I thought I’m gonna have to do like the hummingbird, and just do one little paint stroke at a time.”

Before he died, Jerry Pinkney had created a very small dummy book — full of detailed black and white sketches of the backs of animals and life-size ants. The first thing Brian did was enlarge the dummy book — about 300% he says, so he could examine the images.

“I spent my whole childhood watching him illustrate his books,” says Brian. “I would come home from school and spend time in his studio and watch him while he was drawing. And I would learn how he worked. And then he would give me techniques and I would practice doing them in my own little home studio, which I had set up in my room. Actually, it was a walk-in closet.”

But, Brian says, he and his father had very different styles. Where Jerry Pinkney was detail oriented, Brian is more fluid and impressionistic. “It was kind of like a meditation in a way,” Brian says, “because I literally was combining my dad’s structure, like the architecture of his drawing, with my brushstroke.”

Sascha Alper says The Littlest Drop started out in her mind as an environmental book — there’s two pages in the middle that are just of the fire, burning. But she says it’s also broader than that: “I really thought about this little hummingbird a lot. I really wanted a good ending for her,” Alper explains. “Children now are facing an incredibly challenging world in so many ways. And they are going to have to do what they can, all of them, and they’re going to have to keep hope.”