(Credit: Jacques Goldstyn)

It’s easy to see that Sketch, the boy at the centre of Jacques Goldstyn’s ode to the powers of creative individuality, is different. Where everyone around him is rendered in colour surrounded by bold, inky outlines, Sketch, with his grey, scribbly contours and white interior, looks every bit like his name and favourite hobby. Though his innate curiosity often leads him down the path of messy experimentation, his parents don’t mind. Instead of reprimanding him, they beam with pride as he destroys the kitchen while baking a cake.

It’s a cozy, happy life until grade school, where Sketch’s scruffy appearance and gleeful mixing of lower and uppercase letters doesn’t sit well with the teachers. (Only Madame Beauregard, the art teacher, sees his potential.) Later, in high school – a giant, windowless box resembling less a school than an Amazon warehouse – Sketch encounters a student body who walk around zombielike, staring at the glowing screens in their hands. Happily, he soon comes across three other artistic misfits, and the four become inseparable.

Illustration: Jacques Goldstyn.

Best known for his political cartoons in the Montreal Gazette – under the nom de plume Boris – Goldstyn has made the search for personal freedom the theme of several of his award-winning children’s books: in Azadah, a young Afghan girl escapes her restrictive life by crafting a hot-air balloon from a burqa, while in Letters to a Prisoner, a writer uses the thousands of letters people have written him to fly out the window of his prison cell.

If parts of Sketch feel a tad anachronistic – a severe, ruler-wielding schoolmarm with bun and granny specs and portly, frowning male principal bent on inducing conformity are types from another era (and it must be said that modern schools generally do encourage self-expression) – the charm and humanity of Goldstyn’s illustrations, which conjure Peter Spier, Edward Ardizzone, and Guillermo Mordillo (the latter getting a shoutout as the name of the Sketch family’s suburban street) largely make up for it.

Appreciated by this reader, too, was Goldstyn’s subversion of the story’s expected ending. While Sketch’s friends dream about leaving their city, Sketch, using the book’s prevailing metaphor, has other ideas: “No. We mustn’t go. We have to draw ourselves in.”