I Am Too Absolutely Small for School

Lola is deemed ‘nearly quite big enough to go to school’ but Lola isn’t so sure. Concerned big brother Charlie tries to convince her that she will learn a lot, but Lola has answers for all of his arguments: she can count to ten and doesn’t need to count any higher as she never eats more than ten biscuits in one go, she doesn’t need to learn to write because talking on the telephone is ‘more friendly and straightaway’. Eventually Charlie convinces Lola that she must go to school to reassure her invisible friend Soren Lorensen who is also starting school. But after Lola’s first day it is Charlie who is anxious. He can’t track her down, and eventually finds her at home with a new friend, drinking pink milk.

Child gives a simple story about starting school extra layers of complexity and humour. Some of this will be above the heads of school beginners, but they will enjoy much of the interplay, and the added dimensions make it a book to be shared with older siblings who will get more of the jokes. Child’s post-modernist approach demands that we look carefully at the details in her books, and younger readers are often better at spotting what is textually unsaid. For instance, Charlie discourages Lola from wearing her alligator suit to school, saying ‘for school, stripes are nice’, and only the observant reader will notice that in the first day at school pictures Lola is wearing stripes. The typography is playful, blending and weaving around the illustrations which incorporate a mixture of consciously naïve hand-drawn figures and objects and coloured paper cut-outs blended together with the aid of computer imaging. This disrupts the reader’s conventional, linear method of reading text and image. By doing so, it provides not only an introduction to beginning school, but also an introduction to the playful, parodic and brilliantly disruptive picture books which children will (we hope) encounter throughout their school days.