Children's Books that Lack Happy Endings

For today's disturbing-and-fascinating children's literature, I present two parables.

Although I found Fox by searching for "most hated children's books", I jumped in with both feet by reading it to my four-year-old in the bedtime-reading lineup.  That was, perhaps, a mistake.  I could feel his discomfort by the second page.  At the end he was about to explode into dismayed questions, and I was not prepared at that late hour to turn Fox into the proper lesson that it needed to be.  I was forced toreach for some standard fluff book as a distraction.

That said, Fox is now on my wishlist.  It is a parable so deliciously and horrifyingly dark that I boggle to think a publisher was willing to risk it.  Good for them!  If there is room in the picture book world for this, then there is certainly room for what I want to write about.

Here is the spoiler:

A one-eyed dog rescues a bird from a fire.  She is so burned that she can never fly again.

This tragedy happens by the second or third page.  Already by this point my son was squirming with discomfort, and so was I.

The dog and the bird become the closest of friends.  Together, they run!  The bird sees for the dog, and the dog's running becomes the bird's flight.

The writing is absolutely touching, by the way.  Margaret Wild had me by the heart.  But even these feel-good bits were flooded with tragedy of Greek proportions.

Then along comes the fox, who is enthusiastically welcomed into their friendship by the dog.  But the bird fears the fox, and the dog ignores her fears.  The fox then drives a wedge into the friendship by secretly whispering to the bird that he can run faster with her than the dog can.  Ultimately, hurt by the dog's ignoring of her fears, she gives in and goes for a ride on the fox.  He runs and runs, dumps her far away in a desert, and leaves her with a nasty comment about how she will now get to understand the fox's loneliness.

The bird contemplates giving up and dying on the spot.  (And this is a picture book!)  But then she thinks of how lonely her friend the dog must be.  And so she resolves to find her way back home.

After having read this as a bedtime story to a child who was not yet ready for its deep themes, I can't help but think that Fox is a fire hose among squirt guns.  It is an immensely powerful parable that does not make any attempt to spell out what lesson the reader should take from it.  I would argue that Fox would be best when used as a teaching tool, read out loud by an adult who is armed with a lesson plan, or at the very least who is armed with some time to answer questions.

As with the other disliked children's parables I have dug up, this story could be interpreted several ways.  But I can't help but be amused and horrified at what seems like the obvious interpretation: Fox is about adultery.

Given my parents' love of Shel Silverstein, I am surprised that I never read this one as a child.  Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back, by Shel Silverstein is practically an illustrated children's novel, at well over 100 pages

Look how vulnerable that lion looks!  I haven't given Silverstein enough credit as an artist.  That's a picture of Lafcadio the lion realizing for the first time that he is naked.  But it also sums up the way a reader is left feeling at the end of the book.

Spoiler:

Lafcadio is a wild and innocent lion who eats a hunter, picks up his gun, and learns to shoot.  A man from a circus recruits him, and Lafcadio subsequently becomes rich and famous in the human world.  Lafcadio learns to walk, dress, and eat, and live like a human.  Ultimately he and everyone around him forgets that he is a lion.  Lafcadio becomes jaded and weary of his experiences, and ends up back in Africa as a hunter of lions.  One of the lions reminds Lafcadio of who he really is.  Suddenly, Lafcadio fits in to neither world.  He runs away and is never seen from again.

Gulp!  It's a fun little ride up until the lion's disenchantment with his human life.  Is this a cautionary tale about forgetting one's roots?  Surely if I had read this as a child, I would have mulled over it for years, and likely my conclusions would have had a profound impact on me.  Here is what Silverstein himself has to say about happy endings:

“Happy endings, magic solutions in children’s books create alienation in the child who reads them. The child asks ‘Why don’t I have this happiness thing you’re telling me about?’ and comes to think when his joy stops that he has failed, that it won’t come back.”

There is a spectrum in children's literature.  On one end are the comfort books - those fluffy things you can grab at bedtime to sooth the kids to sleep.  On the other end are the stories so disturbing that a child will hide a book or lock it in a cage in order to prevent themselves from being subjected to it again.  Adventure or didactic tales are more likely to end up nearer to the disturbing end of the spectrum.

Of course, a story that is just disturbing enough to be exciting for one child can well be beyond the pale for another.  As much as I am intrigued by these outliers in the picture book field, I don't believe that a story with a happy ending is inherently the bad thing that Silverstein considered it to be.  I think a story can be lasting and profound without pounding its readers into a quivering emotional heap.  I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for books that offer a bumpy ride with a nice soft pillow at the end.

Satomi Ichikawa

One of my research methods has been to simply pick a shelf at the library and go through each book.  I take a quick look at the art style and a quick glance at the text.  If the text is in verse, I take it; if the art style is anything that catches my eye, I take it.

The book pictured above is one with an art style that caught my eye.  The author and illustrator is Satomi Ichikawa, who, surprisingly, has no formal training in art.  She paints in vivid watercolors, sometimes with a touch of outlining, that beautifully capture the details of other cultures.  I took home My Father's Shop and My Pig Amarillo, and reading them gave me all of the same people-watching pleasure as reading an issue of National Geographic.

Her books nicely illustrate how when a writer illustrates her own book, she can leave so much out of the text.  The remaining writing is spare and clean, without redundancy.

Kadir Nelson

My behind-the-timesness really shows when I admit that until this week, I didn't know who Kadir Nelson is.  By chance at the library I pulled two of his books at random from the shelves.  His specialty is African Americans, and wow, the emotional ranges he can portray leaves me stunned.

Above is a scene from Please, Puppy, Please.  Below is Moses, When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom.  These two books could not possibly illustrate better Nelson's range.  One of these stories is a warm fuzzy read.  The other could easily move a reader to tears.

I don't know precisely what medium Nelson uses, but it appears to be oil paints on the top layer.  Under that is pencil and transparent patches of color.  I am immensely attracted to this technique as both a way to preserve the lines of a drawing, and as a way to reach a full-color finished painting without bogging down in unnecessary details.  For example, in page after page in both books, Nelson includes trees as background elements.  Trees represent a monumental problem for painters, because they are made up of millions of individual leaves and branches.  A picture book illustrator can't hope to paint every leaf on a tree and still meet deadlines.  Nelson's approach is to draw the shape of the tree in pencil, scribble in a curly texture that approximates leaves, put a wash of color over that, and then touch up the dark areas with another wash, and the light areas with opaque color.

The Giant's Socks

Here is today's naptime progress.  I found some inspiration in one of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators's previous Golden Kite Award winners:

You wouldn't know it to look at this tiny image, but Watson uses a technique not unsimilar to what I am building towards: a transparent medium on top of a drawing, that is then touched up with a opaque medium.  He uses watercolor and egg tempera, specifically.

I am particularly attracted to the way he handles his drawings.  The lines are painted over with lines of color.  Every object is essentially outlined with a darker shade of the color that it is filled with.  In this way, he carefully preserves his elegant and naturalistic representations of plants and animals, while addig an extra boost of saturation.  The amateur botanist in me swoons at the specific plants elegantly filling the corners of his action scenes!

Although I have no intention of imitating him to this degree, I could spend an hour staring at the knit socks he so lovingly painted onto the giant. Watson rendered each and every thread!