My Hair is as Long as a River

‘My hair is the first thing you’ll notice.’ A boy talks about his extraordinary long hair in rhyme, with illustrations that match and enrich the various aspects of his hair – ‘soft as a blanket –‘ ‘dense as a forest’ ‘as soothing as friends.’ And this is where this is a complex book: it is not just a run-down of a boy with long hair, but a book of magical realism and remarkable warmth.

The interplay between illustration and text is fascinating: his hair is ‘coarse’ (there are some vivid adjectives in this book!) and he is depicted as having his long hair turning into leafy branches, with birds and their ‘younglings’ in nests; his hair is ‘fierce,’ and the artwork shows it as thunderclouds, with lightning coming through, a very expressive painting of a rainstorm, with the boy as a young magician. Recounting opening after opening is a huge temptation, but really I have to encourage adults as well as child readers to take their time over all the different aspects of this boy’s emotional and imaginative life.

Clearly some readers might see this book as an early example of gender politics, and there are elements here about the boy’s long hair that could be a fruitful start of a whole range of questions, but this is about a boy with spectacular hair: we are told that ‘some people don’t understand it,’ but we aren’t taken further into what prompts his choices. We are in effect looking at what his hair tells us about him, and about the world the boy inhabits, and in doing so carries a message of how it’s important to be who you want to be.