Picture books on difficult topics face a unique challenge: how do they balance explaining the subject clearly while keeping language simple, but not patronising or overly-explicit?

Consumer demand for this category of book means there is a growing list of nuanced titles, ranging from topics such as homosexuality, civil rights, mental health and death. These books serve as milestones in educating young readers about the difficult realities of everyday life. One of the exciting things about this is that no two books deal with a same topic in the same way; while one may gently broach the topic using similes and veiled language, another will be terse and matter of fact.

Two examples of such approaches areThe Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown and The Goodbye Book by Todd Parr. Both are picture books discussing death for a similarly aged audience, but tackle the topic in very different ways.

The Dead Bird gives a concise, unemotional account of the funereal practices of burying a dead bird, happened upon by a group of friends. Wise Brown doesn’t shy away from being explicit: the word “dead” is used 17 times in the book. The anatomy of death is portrayed by Wise Brown in a pragmatic tone: “that was the way animals got when they had been dead for some time – cold dead and stone still with no heart beating”. The children are then “glad” they can perform funeral rites for the bird, and bury it among flowers and sing to it “the way grown-up people did when someone died”. They continue to perform these actions on subsequent visits to the park “until they forgot”.

The Dead Bird leaves little room for emotional responses to the dead bird – one could argue that, having had no prior relationship to the bird, there was no sense of grief that could be attributed to the children. Yet, in a book that deals explicitly with death and burials, it is interesting that the only real portrayal of something akin to grief is when the children cry “because their singing was so beautiful and the ferns smelled so sweetly and the bird was dead”.

The Goodbye Book, on the other hand, is a book which deals only with the emotional side of grief. The basis of the goodbye is ambiguous, but through illustration is implied that the goldfish’s friend has died. Through anthropomorphic techniques, the book explores different emotional reactions the reader may have after saying goodbye to someone and not seeing them again; scenarios of low mood, sleeplessness, lack of appetite, sadness and anger take up a page each. Through the goldfish, the reader sees that while grief may feel emotionally overwhelming, they are loved and there is hope for happiness again. While the language is still simple, it focuses entirely on the emotional – the practicalities of death are not discussed.

These are two very different responses to the challenge of portraying death in children’s terms: Todd Parr attempts to help the child navigate their feelings and offer a sense of hopefulness for emotional healing, while Wise Brown presents the practicalities of death perhaps in a move to demystify it and show the child a step-by-step guide to what the mourners do when burying someone. This prompts question: What are the purposes of these books? Are they here to educate the child reader on aspects their guardian aren’t sure how to convey, or do they exist as books which facilitate the difficult conversation between reader and child?

About the Author: Rosie Gailor will begin her PhD study at QMUL this autumn. Her research interests include the novels of Roald Dahl and gendered portrayals of abuse in his works.

In his introduction to The Complete First Edition: The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2014), Jack Zipes, the book’s translator and editor, talks about the birth of the first-edition Grimms’ tales. According to Zipes, the initial intention of the brothers to preserve the oral tales was met by misunderstanding and criticism, which in part contributed to the change of their editing principles in the following editions. We all know the rest of the story: over forty-odd years, the ‘young and inexperienced’ brothers stepped into their later years, and the originally ‘pungent’, ‘naïve’, ‘blunt’, and ‘unpretentious’ tales were injected with a new and longer life. The tales were now largely free of their more horrific elements and were infused with religious and moral teachings, thus making them more suitable and interesting for families and children to read.

Instead of focusing on the philological and historical significance of the first-edition Grimm’s tales, Zipes’ introduction sparks my curiosity on the careers of those authors, editors, and publishers who choose to create literature for the young: What makes them decide to write/produce books for children? What are the difficulties they have encountered during the writing and publication of a children’s book? How different would it be if we compare their early works with their later works in terms of style and content? What influences him/her to make such changes? Needless to say, the answers vary from person to person, from culture to culture, and from time to time, but knowing more about the stories behind the scenes may help us to better understand how individual practitioners balance their creative ideas with considerations of the market and censorship in the production of children’s literature.

The first-edition Grimm’s tales, as described by Zipes, have ‘a beguiling honesty’. They have not only been honest in reflecting human nature and, potentially, Germanic folk culture, but have also honestly captured the ‘young and inexperienced’ brothers at the beginning of their career as editors of the tales. Moreover, they also draw our attention to the practitioners of children’s literature and their first works. What brings them to the field and how do they grow in their careers?

About the Author: Huiyun Mo will begin her PhD study at QMUL this September. She has broad research interests in Children’s Literature, with a particular focus on the imagination of future childhood in Science Fiction for the young. Her study will explore within a cross-cultural context the biopolitics of posthuman childhood in YA Speculative Fiction.

Illustration is something that is welcome, even expected, in all books for children. It is not unusual to have children’s books, even ones aimed at a post-infant audience, completely devoid of text; it is understood that children know how to read images. Reading images is undoubtedly a skill, but is it one that is under-valued? The older a child gets, the less reliant on images they are expected to become.

I am increasingly more and more interested in this perceived binary between what is considered for children and what is considered for adults. And it strikes me that, in terms of books and publishing, YA is the battleground between the two. Not only in content, tone and language, but also visual interpretation.

YA books are very seldom illustrated, with the exception of increasingly popular graphic novels (themselves often overlooked for prizes or contested when in receipt of one), and it is rare indeed to find a novel for adults which features more than a stylistic chapter heading. Why is this the case? In my research I examine ways in which museums approach interactive exhibits and learning within their displays. A key theme that seems to cut across both museums and literature is that of this clear divide between what is acceptable, or even encouraged, for children and what an adult should have grown out of enjoying or indeed needing in order to enrich their learning.

Do adults need to be able to ‘read’ an image? Of course. Being able to read an image as an adult is not only a useful skill, but it can also be a joyful one. It can aid in our understanding and world building; it can add nuance that might seem clunky or too obvious in a text. We have all become adept watchers of moving images, we can pick up visual clues that help us to guess plot twists, or at least help them make more sense when they have delightfully blindsided us. Why should we be denied that in literature? Why should a child be forced to lose a whole visual world in the name of “growing up”?

Reading is important, but that reading does not have to be restricted to text to be valid.

About the author: Charlotte Slark is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) Student at QMUL and the V&A Museum of Childhood. Her research examines the social and cultural history of the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood from 1974-2010. Her research interests are museums, structural inequality, class, and bureaucracy.