Editorial
“Why Is This a Picture Book?”

ave you been asking yourself this question? Although there has always been a subspecies of picture books that flies over the heads of its purported audience, we’re now seeing a new flock that hits them over the head instead, all in the name of “helpfulness.” Examples of this trend include Garland and Greenberg’s doleful I Never Knew Your Name (Ticknor), in which a young boy ponders the suicide of a neighbor; Mem Fox and Nicholas Wilson’s Feathers and Fools (Harcourt), in which swans and peacocks engage in a blood-soaked allegory of war; and, coming this fall, Marybeth Lorbiecki and David Diaz’s Just One Flick of a Finger (Dial), a story told in suburban-rap style about two young friends, a gun, and a blood transfusion after a shooting: “Now we’re really blood brothers / ‘cause I begged to share, / and they let me give him / the blood I could spare.” (And in case the story and pictures don’t get the message across, Diaz has thoughtfully designed a typeface for the book in which each of the Os looks like the back end of a bullet.)

Talk about target practice. These books are aimed at a picture book audience not because children are demonstrably interested in reading them, or in having them shared in a story hour, but because we think it is important that kids learn some lessons. While all of us can probably agree that suicide is sad, war is bad, and that guns can hurt people, what are these topics doing in picture books? The short answer is, not much: each of these three books scants the complexities of its subject. As former Horn Book editor Anita Silvey tactfully put it (May/June 1995), there are some themes “possibly not resolvable in a thirty-two page format.”

I’ve heard three arguments for the necessity of these books. The first runs along the lines of, This is reality, children face this reality all of the time, it’s time that children’s books stopped pretending that children’s lives are untouched by social and cultural malaise. It’s the same argument that was made, justly, when young adult literature thirty years ago turned to what came to be called the “new realism.” But the needs and interests of the picture book audience are different from those of adolescents. How many story hour audiences ask to hear “that one about the alcoholic dad” (c.f. Niki Daly’s My Dad [McElderry]) again? And when they do ask again for Judith Viorst’s Tenth Good Thing about Barney (Atheneum), is it because they “need” it, or because they like it?

The second argument states that these books are not intended for story hour; instead, they are designed for children “dealing with” a particular situation, offering kids a chance to see others in a similar situation, and to thus work through their problems or fears through vicarious experience. This seems a simplistically literal-minded assessment of how reading works, but it is received wisdom among too many children’s librarians and educators. I recall a request on the CHILDLIT listserv for a book for a child who was afraid of lawnmowers. Is a book always the appropriate solution?

Third, it is argued that these books are for older readers, not for the traditional, pre-reading picture book audience. If that is so, then this purported audience is being shortchanged. If you’re in fifth grade, and you want to know what a gun can do to a friendship, read Walter Dean Myers’s Scorpions (Harper). The tragedy of war? There are any number of memoirs and novels that powerfully capture this experience. Suicide? For upper elementary students, Richard Peck’s Remembering the Good Times (Delacorte) is not that much of a stretch, and I remain unconvinced of the need to stretch too young. Of course, none of these books are as easy — or salable — as picture books, but since when were hard truths supposed to be easy?

— Roger Sutton

From the July/August 1996 issue of The Horn Book Magazine