Margaret Robson Kett reviews eight new picture books

A pile of picture books to savour – what better start to the year? Experienced authors and artists are met again, and new favourites are found, in these eight books. Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood, wonderful book makers in their own right, make a special team in The Treasure Box (Viking, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780670073658). A boy and his father are forced to flee their home as the enemy advances, bombing the town’s library on their way. They take one surviving book with them as a treasure ‘rarer than rubies, more splendid than silver, greater than gold’. This writer is at her best when she is sparing with her text and allows the illustrations to complete the story. Wild’s text has just the right intonation and rhythm for its theme – people do terrible things to each other, humanity survives. Blackwood’s faces and figures are ideal; wan hopefulness characterises most of them. Her manipulation of paper, used in collage and cut-out, improves with each book, and here she creates a landscape that matches the story – ‘fragile as butterflies’, indeed – and that evokes every land ever laid waste by war. The healing of the country and culture is symbolised by the restoration of the long overdue book ‘about our people, about us’. This will be irresistible to story lovers of all ages. Mem Fox has produced some excellent bedtime books, of which the sublime Time for Bed (1993) is an outstanding example. Her latest, Tell Me about Your Day Today (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781742835785), has a nameless boy conversing with Blue Horse, Greedy Goose, and Fat Rabbit about their adventurous days and how ‘the whole wild thing turned out okay’. Lauren Stringer’s illustrations are dominated by a lovely twilight blue that brings together the separate narratives. As with other books by Fox, there is plenty of room for the adult reader to talk with the child listener about ‘the who, the what and the why’. The versatile Jackie French’s Dinosaurs Love Cheese (Angus & Robertson, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780732292645) features a parade of marauding animals who have cleaned a house out of food behind an oblivious mother’s back. A delighted preschooler enjoys the spectacle of tigers eating pizzas and gorillas swinging through the fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket. In most spreads, Rycroft’s paintings seem cramped; this leaves little scope for her animal shenanigans and pop culture references. (A gorilla clutching a lettuce is being circled by tiny planes.) Despite the framing narrative of a shopping trip, the action seems disjointed, and this is exacerbated by uneven rhyme. Attention, aspiring PhD candidates. Does the ‘og’ ending provide the most slapstick opportunities in rhyming children’s literature? It is in rollicking good form in Dog on Log (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781862919648). A dog and a frog prepare for a party, with next to no help from a hog. A rat tries to steal a birthday cake from the feline guest of honour, and things soon deteriorate. Illustrator Kat Chadwick has clearly enjoyed playing with all the hilarious possibilities of Tania Ingram’s text. Chadwick’s summery pen and ink drawings (reminiscent of Colin West’s work) are charming without being cute, and illustrate much that is only alluded to in the short rhyming sentences. As demonstrated in her previous books, Lisa Shanahan knows small children, their routines, loves, and fears. Her latest book, illustrated by Sara Acton, is Daisy and the Puppy (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781742830513). Daisy’s family has had one baby after another, affording them little time to find a puppy. Daisy, a dog-lover, has resorted to washing the neighbourhood dogs in an old baby bath and baying at sirens from the laundry basket while wearing a fake tail. One day Ollie, a dog with ‘gooey pie eyes and a firework tail’, appears in Mrs Arkwright’s Pet Shop window and Mum succumbs to the inevitable. Not all the family are in love with Ollie, however, which threatens his place in the family, and Daisy’s happiness. The story’s structure is not helped by a wobbly timeline, and the layout of some pages does not always support the quality of the illustrations. Acton’s talent – her action figures are especially good – is wasted on some pages of no consequence. The scene where Daisy achieves her heart’s desire does not include the reader in the celebration, and barely includes Ollie. Remembering Lionsville (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781742373201) is composed of the accomplished Indigenous artist Bronwyn Bancroft’s family history. In a biographical note at the end, she exhorts the reader to ‘listen to your old people, write stuff down, do drawings and, most of all, take pride in your family’s struggles and victories’. As in many oral histories the narration ranges widely, with the reader invited into each scene. The inclusion of photographs seems appropriate, but they are poorly reproduced and oddly placed, possibly in a deliberate attempt to emphasise the fragmentary nature of the record keeping. The collage with Bancroft’s distinctive artwork jars rather than forming part of a bigger picture. A deeply personal book can make the reader feel like an intruder. Despite her wide appeal, Remembering Lionsville might have a limited audience. Cori Brooke and Sue deGennaro have collaborated on a story of the ultimate friendship, Max and George (Viking, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780670076352). The phase of a child’s life during which they have an imaginary friend seldom lasts long, but its emotional intensity resonates and is depicted well here. Max and George dress alike, think alike, and ‘[share] the same feelings’. As long as Max had a window to look into, he always had George. But then his new teacher makes him sit away from the window. How will Max manage without George when he gets the jitters? DeGennaro makes inspired use of graph paper and fragments of worksheets in her compositions, and her use of school uniform blue conveys Max’s enclosed world. Brooke tells the story entirely in Max’s voice, while showing his parents’ tolerance, and this helps to make the ending a triumph. ‘Bea is a bird of unusual tastes’, according to her creator Christine Sharp (University of Queensland Press, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780702249617). Among her pen and ink companions, Bea stands out of the flock. While they do bird things like build nests, chirp and eat ants, she dances and flies with bats, dreaming of ‘travelling the world in a hot air balloon’. Bea has an elongated fish shape, more scaly and streamlined than feathered: Sharp has imagined her as a child might draw her, always looking for new adventures. The scene where Bea is baking is a jarring example of the misuse of collage in the book: scanned fabric, which is the wrong scale, and photoshopped knitted tea cosies and cupcakes spoil the composition. The landscapes through which Bea travels later in the book weigh her down. Overall, there is no tension – this perky bird is her own happy ending.

Margaret Robson Kett

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