Signs of Plenty

Jeff Hynds‘ Round-up of Spring Picture Books

While I’ve been writing this review article, I have discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I’ve read and re-read – with great pleasure it must be said – well over two hundred picture books, virtually all of them published in the first few months of this year.

I just cannot believe, in these difficult times, that publishers would publish so extensively if they were not managing to do a bit of selling as well. This is hardly evidence of an illiterate nation. Mysteriously, none of the proliferating reports about our lamentable reading standards (and I think I’ve read them all) ever mentions the burgeoning children’s book market.

For obvious reasons I can’t review everything I was sent, though, so I’ve been having a truly stimulating time bringing my critical faculties to bear. I looked for that full and satisfying conjuncture of picture and text that is the hallmark of the true picture book. I hoped for strength and depth, wit and energy – rejecting anything insipid, babyish, patronising, unnecessarily cluttered or over-sentimental. I have quite often been dubious about magnificent artwork when the accompanying text is – how shall I put it? – limp. In short, I’ve been RUTHLESS. And in the end made the selection that follows:-

Midnight Play, Kveta Pacovska, Neugebauer/Ragged Bears, 185618 041 7, £19.50

Saranohair, Gillian Johnson, Annick Press/Ragged Bears, 155037 211 4, £6.95

The Widow’s Broom, Chris Van Allsburg, Andersen, 0 86264 453 4, £8.99

We begin with the strange and surreal. I found myself going back time and time again to Midnight Play. It’s the sort of book where you understand enough of it (`It’s a play in 42 pieces’ – I managed to work this out in the end) to realise there’s quite a bit more to understand that’s beyond you. The book has ingenious split pages and cut-outs, as well as the moon on the end of a piece of string. It’s all to do with drama being an illusion (I think) and with the indispensability of moonlight (OK, I give up). Actually I’d have liked an instruction book to go with it. A large book, lavish, expensive too, but definitely intriguing.

Saranohair (yes, it’s Sara No Hair because she hasn’t got any) is quite extraordinary. It’s a first children’s book by a Canadian English teacher. The book opens at the top like a reporters notebook, and much use is made of the long, narrow shape that results. Again, it’s quite hard to work out what’s going on – but very enjoyable trying. I decided it was either a send-up or an elaborate esoteric joke. It’s some story! Really weird! I’m not sure that falling down holes in the ground into a completely different world peopled by grotesque creatures who all seem to be interested in hats is entirely appropriate for a children’s book. About as unlikely as a caterpillar smoking a hookah, I’d say.

Chris Van Allsburg, master of the mysterious, has produced another eerie book in The Widow’s Broom. With over 1,500 words this has quite a substantial text for a picture book, but is nevertheless a true picture book, since the striking sepia prints frequently carry the action as well as evoke the atmosphere. There are grim undertones to this story, about boorish, bullying behaviour and people destroying what they don’t understand, but fortunately the widow’s essential goodness and ingenuity win through.

In contrast, there are a lot of picture books this year about family situations. These four all feature rather lonely, isolated children:

Under the Stairs, Fiona Dunbar, Hutchinson, 0 09 176187 5, £8.99

The Bear Under the Stairs, Helen Cooper, Doubleday, 0 385 40210 4, £8.99

Jackdaw, Ann Cartwright, ill. Reg Cartwright, Hutchinson, 0 09 176427 0, £8.99

All the Better to See You With!, Margaret Wild, ill. Pat Reynolds, Little Ark/Ragged Bears, 186373 232 2, £7.95

In every case, however, they’re able to cope because they are, each in their own way, very resourceful. In Under the Stairs young Sophie, bored by Sunday afternoons at Aunt Sarah’s, manages to escape to another world below stairs. It’s rather an alarming world, albeit (one supposes) a figment of her imagination, where household objects come to life and in some cases threaten her, but Sophie is more than a match for every situation. In The Bear Under the Stairs young William is terrified of `the place under the stairs’ because he believes a bear lives there. From time to time, in order to mollify it, he throws down scraps of food, slamming the door tight-shut afterwards. Again, this is a somewhat alarming story, for the presence of the bear is all pervasive in the excellent illustrations.

The bold, stylised paintings of Reg Cartwright illustrate Jackdaw, a true story from the illustrator’s own childhood, of a lonely boy who, Kes-like, brings up a jackdaw single-handed. My heart missed a beat when I thought the jackdaw was about to suffer the same fate as the kestrel in Barrie Hines’ novel, but this story ends happily enough. I’m not sure what the RSPB would have to say about all this, though.

All the Better to See You With! is the touching story of a little girl called Kate whose family is rather large and noisy. It’s a caring family but inevitably Kate, who is `small and quiet’, sometimes gets overlooked. Accordingly she’s quite old before her parents realise she’s short-sighted. This works very well as a picture book, since the illustrations enable us to see the world through Kate’s eyes, both before and after she gets her glasses.

More books about children and their family situations:

The Granny Who Wasn’t Like Other Grannies, Denis Bond, ill. Valeria Petrone, Hippo/Scholastic, 0 590 55133 7, £2.99 pbk

The Tusk Fairy, Nicola Smee, Orchard, 185213 542 5, £7.99

The Long Weekend, Troon Harrison, ill. Michael Foreman, Andersen, 0 86264 426 7, £7.99

Farm Morning, David McPhail, Blackie, 0 216 93215 7, £8.99

Get Lost, Laura!, Jennifer Northway, Deutsch/Scholastic, 0 590 54023 8, £7.99

Bully, David Hughes, Walker, 0 7445 2169 6, £8.99

The Granny Who Wasn’t Like Other Grannies and The Tusk Fairy are about Tim’s granny in the first and Lizzie’s in the second. Tim’s embarrassed by the antics of his very unconventional granny and wishes she’d be more stereotypical and sit in a rocking-chair and knit. In contrast Lizzie’s granny saves the day by a marathon knitting session. Both books are very humorous and entertaining and should be read by all grannies, as well as their grandchildren.

Two excellent books are The Long Weekend and Farm Morning. Both depict a child’s relationship with a parent – a mother in one and a father in the other. Both, in different ways, are marvellously illustrated, and both touch deep emotional chords. Light-hearted on the face of it, in each story there’s a sadness underneath.

Jennifer Northway’s picture books always have a strong story, and a point to make. Her illustrations are not only beautiful but very keenly observed. This talented author-illustrator is at her best in Get Lost, Laura!, a cautionary tale with a social message particularly appropriate at the moment. Equally appropriate in these modern times is the theme of Bully, though it’s a very unusual treatment of the subject. Bullying is a pretty crazy, mixed-up matter, and David Hughes has certainly conveyed this by innovative and eye-catching use of some very large pages, where the ramifications of the whole bullying syndrome appear before us in an amazing series of cartoon-like pictures. It has created quite a bit of interest in the Hynds’ home since it arrived, and some mystification too. It’s a mystifying area, of course.

And now, off to the forest:

The Owl Who Became the Moon, Jonathan London, ill. Ted Rand, Viking, 0 670 84896 4, £8.99

In Search of the Hidden Giant, Jeanne Willis, ill. Ruth Brown, Andersen, 0 86264 433 1, £7.99

Shadow the Deer, Theresa Radcliffe, ill. John Butler, Viking, 0 670 83852 7, £8.99

King of the Woods, David Day, ill. Ken Brown, Andersen, 0 86264 422 4, £6.99

The Heart of the Wood, Marguerite Davol, ill. Sheila Hamanaka, Viking, 0 670 84891 3, £8.99

The Ark, Rien Poortvliet, Lion, 0 7459 2213 9, £19.99

No Dodos, Amanda Wallwork, Ragged Bears, 185714 016 8, £6.99

‘Wouldn’t it be nice
to take a ride on a train
through a forest
in the dark
under the stars’

So begins The Owl Who Became the Moon, a poetic evocation, with dramatic painting, of a forest ride, with creatures all around and an owl, silhouetted against the moon, gliding across the sky. Somewhere in another forest lies a sleeping giant, and two children are searching. Is it just the trees, or is that the giant’s hair we can see?

‘A creature of enormous size,
With elms for arms and oaks for thighs’

Jean Willis’ carefully crafted octosyllabic couplets are richly illustrated by Ruth Brown’s paintings of the forest in the outstanding picture book, In Search of the Hidden Giant. Again we’re deep in the forest with Shadow the Deer. Shadow has to leave her three-day-old fawn to fend for himself while she goes to the lakeside to drink. Meanwhile Redflank the fox has hungry cubs… The story is exciting and dramatic and beautifully illustrated by wildlife illustrator John Butler. Then we have the talented artist Ken Brown illustrating David Day’s amusingly cumulative tale (or is it fable) of the wren who triumphs over all the other much larger woodland creatures to become King of the Woods herself, evidently undergoing a sex-change at the same time. Now into Winderly Woods, to search for the tree that will give us The Heart of the Wood from which the wood-carver will create the fiddle that will fill the woods with music. Another cumulative tale, this time of the house-that-Jack-built type, only it’s the fiddle that Jack built. A good rollicking text with strong, expressive paintings.

I’m pleased that Lion Publishing have re-launched The Ark in a new, smaller-format edition. It’s a wonderful picture book (though I have to say I preferred the original large size, expensive though it was), with something for everyone – a journal, a commonplace book, an artist’s notebook, an instruction manual, a collection of witty observations, a bible story, and above all a warning that if we are to save our environment we need, like Noah, to build another ark before it’s too late.

This is exactly the point made by No Dodos, outwardly a counting book for the very young, but given universal significance because each animal counted is an endangered species. One is already extinct. A fuller explanation of the dangers faced by threatened species is included at the end. This is a first book for Amanda Wallwork, who illustrates by an ingenious torn-paper technique.

And quickly, on to some animal fables:

Mole in a Hole (and Bear in a Lair), M Christina Butler, ill. Meg Rutherford, Simon & Schuster, 0 7500 1384 2, £3.99 pbk

The Brave Hare, Dave and Julie Saunders, Frances Lincoln, 0 7112 0760 7, £7.99; 0 7112 0761 5, £3.99 pbk

No Problem, Eileen Browne, ill David Perkins, Walker, 0 7445 2205 6, £8.99

The Grasshopper and the Ant, Graham Percy, David Bennett Books/Ragged Bears, 185602 059 2, £2.95

Four elegantly told animal fables, showing us in turn that collaboration is better than confrontation, that men of straw are not to be feared if you have the courage of your convictions, that it’s advisable, when constructing something new, not to rush at it, and that if you don’t choose to act when the moment is right then you’ll pay for it later. I thought I might send copies of all four to the Department For Education.

Finally, I come to my pick of the bunch:

Once Upon a Time, John Prater, with words by Vivian French, Walker, 0 7445 2252 8, £7.99

The Big Pets, Lane Smith, Viking, 0 670 83378 9, £8.99

The King of Spain’s Daughter, Christine Gray, ill. Teresa Foster, Blackie, 0 216 93214 9, £8.50

I’ve decided to give my top accolade to these three, because, for me, these are books of outstanding quality. Although they are in some ways quite different, their similarity is that they each juxtapose, in a clever way, the ordinary with the unlikely. I think it is this which I found so compelling. In Once Upon a Time we have on each double-page spread the same country setting, with a cottage, fields and distant hills. In the cottage lives a small boy with his parents. As the day goes by the family follow their everyday routine as dad goes off to work, the sun comes up, the little boy rides his tricycle. So used to this is he that he takes in very little of the events which begin to unfold around him. But we see it all, and that is where the enjoyment and mounting excitement lie. The pictures are excellent, the telegraphic text perfect, the idea brilliant. We have here a classic, I’m sure, with an author-reader bond as strong as Rosie’s Walk, and an intertextuality reminiscent of The Jolly Postman.

It’s ordinary enough for children to have pets, but in The Big Pets they are very big and the owners quite small. The central character, a small girl with a big cat, ventures out at night into a strange and surreal dream world. Lane Smith’s illustrations are highly evocative, more symbolically powerful than in his The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, which is perhaps not surprising, since that was a work of parody. Here, however, we have an allegory. Cats, of course, drink milk, and it’s milk that is the life-sustaining force throughout the book. This is a tale of longing, and escape to a world where children will be safe.

Woven round the classic nursery rhyme `I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear’, The King of Spain’s Daughter (which isn’t actually published until July, but I had to include it) is a quite hilarious piece of comedy. An ordinary boy, living in an ordinary house with an ordinary mum and dad, opens his front door to find that a rather more than ordinary girl has called to play. She happens to be the daughter of the King of Spain. The little princess does indeed play with the little boy, happily if somewhat awkwardly in her regal attire, and is just sitting down to `tea’ (fish fingers and chips) when her dad, accompanied by the whole panoply of the medieval Spanish court, arrives to take her home. The narrative throughout is down to earth (“‘So that’s your old nut tree,” she said’), which of course adds to the humour.

Well, that’s just about it – some 30 titles in all. I’m sorry about the other 170. I’ll just pluck three more from the pile, almost, but not quite, at random… it’s hard to be ruthless, isn’t it?

Another Custard Pie, Roger McGough, ill. Graham Percy, HarperCollins, 0 00193742 1, £8.99

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning, ill. Andre Amstutz, Orchard, 185213 414 3, £8.99

Introducing Picasso, Juliet Heslewood, Little, Brown, 0 316 90470 8, £8.99

Here’s Graham Percy again, straight from his fables, illustrating Another Custard Pie, a Roger McGough joke about the circus running away to join a little boy (yes, I’ve got it the right way round). Imagine a lion in your wardrobe, a seal in the bath and a Big Top in the living room. The whole family get involved. Mum does backward flips on a galloping pony, Dad falls off the monocycle because he’s not wearing his monocycle clips and the house becomes a shambles. (See why I couldn’t leave it out?) It all becomes too much for the boy because there’s nothing left for tea except… yes, you’ve guessed it. And here’s Andre Amstutz, straight from ‘Funnybones’, attractively illustrating The Pied Piper of Hamelin with busy, lively pictures, though I was surprised that the Transylvanian tribe ending was cut out. Finally, here’s Pablo Picasso illustrating a picture book about himself. And not a bad artist either! Everyone who’s seen this information book for juniors on my desk has been attracted to it. An excellent idea, suggesting untold possibilities. At the end of his life Picasso said `That’s enough isn’t it? What more need I do? What can I add to all that? Everything is said.’ I was startled to come across these words in Introducing Picasso, because that’s exactly how I’m feeling right now.

Jeff Hynds is a major figure in the movement to promote ‘real’ reading. Some time ago he retired from Thames Polytechnic in South London, where he ran a famous reading course, to begin a new career as a freelance lecturer. He’s now much in demand for in-service work with teachers all over Britain.