A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  There is something liberating in all this. It confirms something we all know, which is that “taste” at this — or any — age is an elusive, reaching thing. And that for every non-Henson Elmo book out there (yes, we have one, and yes, he loves it, and Bruce put it in the trash on Tuesday without a moment’s pause), there is a Denise Fleming (Barnyard Banter — genius!) and a Richard Scarry (Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — best boy-book ever) and, most wonderful of all, some bizarre yet irresistible new kooky book yet to be discovered to make things right in the universe. And who knows? We, the snarky all-knowing parents, may even learn a thing or two.

  So: channel your inner authoritarian and bin everything cutesy and stupid. Trust your ineluctable sense of “taste.” But be prepared for some surprises. And for God’s sake, stay away from Chuck E. Cheese. That way lies madness.

  MORE GREAT BOOKS FOR BABIES

  Janet Ahlberg and Allan Ahlberg, Peek-a-Boo!

  34 pp. This nicely oversize board book with sturdy die-cut pages is the perfect format for the Ahlbergs’ classic picture book, which follows a baby through his ordinary but eventful day.

  Byron Barton, Boats; Planes; Trains; Trucks

  32 pp. With simple, direct text and black-outlined, color-blocked pictures, these oversize board books are ideal for young vehicle enthusiasts whose exuberance might otherwise result in ripped pages.

  Margaret Chodos-Irvine, Ella Sarah Gets Dressed

  32 pp. Undeterred by her more decorous family, Ella Sarah insists on wearing a flashy outfit of her choosing. Happily, her friends arrive for tea wearing equally outrageous costumes. In this lap-size board-book version of the Caldecott Honor Book, the illustrations retain their distinctive patterns, colors, and sizes.

  Eileen Christelow, Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed

  32 pp. A popular picture book with a rhyming, repetitive refrain well suited to the audience is nicely reissued — essentially unchanged from the original — as a lap-size board book.

  Olivier Dunrea, Gossie; Gossie & Gertie

  32 pp. Dunrea’s captivating stories about two inquisitive goslings make perfect board books. Dunrea is precisely attuned to the toddler world: making friends, losing beloved objects, wanting someone else’s beloved objects. The goslings march across the clean white pages in their bright blue and red boots, having tiny adventures and learning about the world as they go.

  Mem Fox, illustrations by Judy Horacek, Where Is the Green Sheep?

  32 pp. This charming tale, in which readers search for an elusive green sheep, works beautifully as a board book. The bouncy, rhyming text will appeal to very young children, and Horacek’s art remains clear and clean and easy to interpret. Right in line with toddlers’ sense of playful discovery.

  Mem Fox, illustrations by Helen Oxenbury, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes

  40 pp. Two babies join a multiethnic playgroup. Fox’s lilting verse (“And both of these babies,/as everyone knows,/had ten little fingers/and ten little toes”) just has to be read aloud, and Helen Oxenbury’s spacious illustrations, featuring her irresistible round-headed tots, will engage even the youngest viewers.

  Chihiro Nakagawa, illustrations by Junji Koyose, Who Made This Cake?

  40 pp. Miniature workers use tiny construction vehicles to make a giant cake. Kids will love searching for the little guy who trips himself up, and truck fans will pore over every action-filled scene.

  Satoru Onishi, Who’s Hiding?

  32 pp. Onishi introduces — with humor — eighteen animals, six colors, and the child-appealing visual challenge of camouflage.

  Leslie Patricelli, Higher! Higher!

  32 pp. A smiling dad pushes a little girl on a swing; with each push, she says, “Higher! Higher!” Up she goes, flying to greet a giraffe, a mountain climber, an airplane. Finally, she heads into space, where she meets a little green alien at the apex of his own swing. Cheerful cartoonlike acrylics reinforce the book’s preschooler-perfect sensibilities. Also available as a board book.

  Phyllis Root, illustrations by David Walker, Flip, Flap, Fly!

  32 pp. Gently pastoral illustrations and bouncy wordplay introduce animal babies taking their first thrilling “steps.” The spaciously composed illustrations are light-filled and blithely anthropomorphic, the babies clearly overjoyed to be doing their thing. Generous doses of onomatopoeia and alliteration add to the fun.

  There’s no such thing as an “average” picture book, any more than there is such a thing as an “average” child. True, a great majority of picture books are thirty-two pages long; true, they all work via a progression of page turns; true, most have a mix of illustrations and text that tells a story, or sets a mood, or counts objects, or prepares for bedtime. But a picture book can be twenty-four pages long, wordless, on the subject of farm animals, and aimed at one-year-olds. Or it can have forty pages, with a text as long as your average novella, on a subject as fraught as the Holocaust, and appropriate for middle-schoolers. The umbrella term picture book includes concept books (ABCs, counting, colors, shapes, opposites); folk and fairy tales, Mother Goose rhymes, songs; intimate family stories and school stories; bedtime stories; historical fiction; nonfiction; fantasy; nonsense; bibliotherapy on all subjects from divorce to death; satires and send-ups. . . . The list goes on — we haven’t fallen off the edge of the known picture-book world yet. In her insightful book Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose says that the infinite variety of prose styles used by authors “remind[s] us how many rooms there are in the house of art”; she could easily have been talking about picture books.

  Volumes have been written on the art and history of the picture book (see particularly Barbara Bader’s seminal American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within). But what exactly do parents, faced with shelf upon shelf of skinny spines or (perhaps even worse) loud, glitzy covers, really need to know? Three crucial truths can be stated. One, the picture book is an object, but once opened, it is an experience, one that unfolds through time. Two, picture books are intended for children (a seemingly obvious statement, but you’d be surprised: current marketplace forces mean that most children’s books are sold through large bookstores, and so picture books are often pitched toward the adult buyer rather than the child reader). And three, picture books that work tend to have insight into what makes kids tick at different developmental stages — and many of the best push through those stages to help kids move to the next level of independence.

  Every reading parent will be familiar with at least a few classics — the now de rigueur Goodnight Moon; Make Way for Ducklings; Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel; The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Chicka Chicka Boom Boom — and with favorites from his or her own childhood. But have you ever stopped to consider what a marvel the humble picture book is? Ideally, illustration and text are interdependent, creating a whole in which neither is sufficient without the other (or at least in which one greatly enriches the other). Picture books resemble theater or film more than any other literary format: they rely on the page turn to pace the experience, to unfold the story or build the mood; between one page turn and the next, there must be some tension, or the picture book doesn’t function. A true picture book is so much more than a sequence of words and images — the most breathtaking art, the most memorable prose, is static and lifeless without compelling page turns.

  On an aesthetic level, a parent can apply his or her own honed skills and tastes to choose picture books for a child. Ask yourself these questions: Whether the pictures are cartoons or reproductions of magnificent oil paintings, are they appropriate for the text? Is the text written in a distinct voice? Is it specific to the situation and/or character (i.e., not generic)? If it is written in verse, does it scan, or land with a thud? Are the pictures and text interdependent, or does the text labor to describe something that’s portrayed in detail in the accompanying illustration? Most critically — and this is a criterion that can be applied to any book, for any age, adult or children’s —
does the book come alive? Is there a recognizable world contained in those thirty-two pages?

  You may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of picture books on bookstore and library shelves. To paraphrase a famous stanza from one of the earliest American picture books, Wanda Gág’s 1928 Millions of Cats: there are hundreds of books! thousands of books! millions and billions and trillions of books! Why so many?

  First of all, the picture-book format hasn’t changed significantly since Millions of Cats or, indeed, since 1878’s The Diverting History of John Gilpin by Randolph Caldecott — the British illustrator for whom the Caldecott Medal was named — one of the first picture books to feature the fundamental element of interdependent text and pictures. Picture books are typically a size to either spread out on a reader’s lap or hold comfortably in small hands. Their established standard length of thirty-two pages is due to the constraints of technology: the presses on which books have traditionally been printed produce “signatures” in multiples of sixteen that are then stitched together and bound (for a clear and fascinating account of the whole process, see Aliki’s classic How a Book Is Made). This accident of industry and math has become a form, as defining as a sonata, whose rhythm — of dynamic page turns; of rising action, climax, and resolution; of balance of images and text — we have all internalized. (Changes in technology — e-readers, e-books, and so on — may bring changes in form. Whether the established rhythm will hold its power in a digital age — when the length of a work is measured in time rather than space — remains to be seen.)

  Small children themselves haven’t changed much, either. They still respond, as pioneering children’s book editor Louise Seaman Bechtel wrote in The Horn Book in 1941, to “rhythm and laughter, the sense of climax, the magic of words.” As a child, I loved Gene Zion’s Harry the Dirty Dog — in which a little dog gets so dirty on his day of adventures that he changes from a white dog with black spots into a black dog with white spots — and my children loved it, too. It continues to appeal to children because of the excitement of Harry’s adventures, the strength of Harry’s personality, the tension over Harry’s identity — will his family recognize him? — and the satisfaction when they do. Sigh. A good story is a good story, whether published in 1956, as Harry was, or in 2016. This happy lack of datedness isn’t true for all pre-twenty-first-century picture books, of course, and even Harry shows its age a bit (with the little girl of the family dressed in a very 1950s-ish frock). But the nature of children and of picture books means that the best books feel just as fresh today as when they were first published.

  Another picture book that has stood the test of time is Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit — and it demonstrates another truth about picture books: they can tell large stories in small packages. I have often heard Peter Rabbit described as “sweet” or “cute” — Bunnies! Little blue vests! Tidy English gardens! Naughty Peter disobeys his mother and trespasses in Mr. McGregor’s garden, where he gorges on produce and makes a narrow escape from the irate farmer; safely home, he is sent to bed with camomile tea instead of blackberries like his more obedient sisters. But Peter Rabbit can also be read as a primal rite-of-passage story, with Peter besting not only Mr. McGregor but also his own father (whom Mr. McGregor caught and “put into a pie”). It’s an age-old tale of the small and weak versus the large and powerful — played out in many a legend/ folktale/hero tale, from David versus Goliath, to Brer Rabbit versus Brer Fox, to Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. It’s an archetypal home-adventure-return story, the basis of the hero monomyth made famous by Joseph Campbell. So, merely cute it’s not — and though not all picture books are this deep (or indeed need to be read on that level), the ones you find yourself reading over and over to your child may upon a closer look reveal unsuspected depths: Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak); Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (William Steig); The Snowman (Raymond Briggs).

  The world of the picture book is a child-centered one, where children are the actors, not the acted-upon. When evaluating a picture book, then, ask yourself who’s in charge. Picture books, intended to be experiences for a child, work best when they are on the side of the child. Children are generally eager to learn about their world, move forward, take steps toward independence. It can be argued that all children’s literature is, at its core, about growing up, and picture books in particular mirror that headlong rush.

  The very youngest children wake up every day to an adventure. All parents have had the experience of seeing their baby soaking up experiences like a sponge and changing virtually hour by hour. Babies are wowed by just about everything, so books for babies should be all about making connections with their world: What does a cow say? Oh, it says moo! What is this a picture of? Yes, that’s right, it’s a car. Vroom, vroom! Their books should have either very little text or a text full of rhythm (see “Books for Babies”).

  In books for toddlers, there is a shift toward a readiness to explore the world beyond the safe borders of home and parent. A good picture book for a two-year-old may contain a small adventure — but within very safe confines. In Nancy Tafuri’s Have You Seen My Duckling?, a mother duck takes her offspring for a swim, but one adventurous duckling has set off to chase a butterfly. The simple story follows the mother as she asks various denizens of the pond the title question. What makes the book so good is that on every spread the “missing” duckling is always just visible: behind a water lily, peeking out from behind a tree. The errant duckling is both the object of the game of hide-and-seek and the embodiment of the reassurance toddlers require. Pouch! by David Ezra Stein is perfectly attuned with toddlers’ simultaneous need for safety and independence, as baby kangaroo Joey takes his first hop out of his mother’s pouch and then, unnerved, dives back in again . . . until he’s ready to try again. Each time, Joey ventures forth a little farther before retreating, in the end finding a friend and exploring the world together.

  Four-year-olds’ worlds have expanded into a larger society: play groups, preschool, and neighborhood. Picture books for this age can contain a lot more tension and can take the protagonist farther from home — as long as they still end up safely and happily resolved. In Shirley Hughes’s Alfie Gives a Hand, preschooler Alfie attends his friend Bernard’s birthday party. Alfie is a bit taken aback to learn that the invitation doesn’t include his mother and little sister, Annie Rose, and insists on bringing his security blanket to the party. He hangs on to it doggedly all through the games and lunch in Bernard’s backyard. But another friend, Min, is having a miserable time, and Alfie has to choose between letting Min hold his hand and holding on to his blanket. It’s a small dilemma, preschool-size, but it’s a true one: when he puts the blanket down, Alfie is taking a step toward independence, away from babyhood. At party’s (and book’s) end, safely heading home with Mum and Annie Rose, Alfie decides that next time he’ll leave his blanket at home.

  Successful picture books for older children don’t assume that the child reader has completed the journey to independence, but they often do provide stories in which the character exhibits a greater degree of same. William Steig’s Brave Irene is an edge-of-your-seat- exciting, exquisitely told story of a dressmaker mother and her devoted daughter. The theme is love, but the message is one of girl power, as the mother stays home, sick in bed, while young Irene battles darkness and a raging (and brilliantly personified) blizzard all alone to deliver the duchess’s gown in time for the ball. In Nancy Coffelt’s Fred Stays with Me!, a little girl matter-of-factly describes her two different living situations (her parents are divorced). As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that the one constant in her life is Fred, her dog. But there’s trouble: barking (at Mom’s) and sock-stealing (at Dad’s). When both Mom and Dad declare that “Fred can’t stay with me,” our narrator stands up for herself. “‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘Fred doesn’t stay with either of you. Fred stays with ME!’” Again, although the girl’s level of independence isn’t quite total — she works with her parents to come up with
plans for Fred’s reform — it’s realistic and age-appropriate. Tricia Tusa’s brilliant and quietly subversive illustrations give the little girl’s independence a satisfying visual representation: the parents are never shown in full — we only glimpse them on the edges of illustrations or see their shadows or the backs of their heads.

  Not every picture book reflects children’s developmental stages. A picture book can simply capture a mood, a moment, or a day (Liz Garton Scanlon and Marla Frazee’s All the World; Shutta Crum and Carol Thompson’s Thunder-Boomer!); can be just plain funny or silly (Mo Willems’s Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!; Helen Lester and Lynn Munsinger’s Tacky the Penguin); can be a quiet (Molly Bang’s Ten, Nine, Eight) or a rowdy (Bob Shea’s Dinosaur vs. Bedtime) transition to bedtime. But in picture books such as those discussed above, forward motion is key: the book should contain at least the possibility of a larger world. When a book actively strives to keep the child locked in childhood relationships and needs, it’s not truly a child’s picture book. A doting parent may enjoy a book about a little bunny whose mission in life is to tell his mommy how much he loves her, but there’s nothing there for the child audience. Far more realistic and definitely more on the child’s side are picture books in which the parent tells the child that he is loved — unconditionally, and despite the child’s behavior. Being assured of a parent’s unconditional love is of perennial interest to children, who are by nature and necessity the centers of their own universes, and so it is a fine topic for a picture book. And there are a slew of these, from Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s The Runaway Bunny to Barbara M. Joosse and Barbara Lavallee’s warm, not-too-sweet Mama, Do You Love Me? to David Shannon’s hilarious, honest, deeply poignant No, David!