The extraordinary picture book, The Stuff of Stars, by Marion Dane Bauer and Ekua Holmes.<\/p><\/div>
\nThere are\u00a0picture books that engage, transport, amuse, intrigue, enchant, comfort, or even haunt adults, but that don’t connect with\u00a0the children who are their purported audience. This\u00a0would be absolutely fine\u2014picture books are a unique and endlessly variable art form\u2014but\u00a0it can be hard to\u00a0overcome customers’ resistance to buying them for themselves. As one of my bookselling colleagues said recently, people will spend $40 on glossy coffee table art books they’ll look through once or twice, but are reluctant to buy themselves\u00a0an $18 picture book they can’t stop leafing through in the store.
\nI’ve had more than a few customers over the years\u00a0pore through\u00a0picture books, then sadly place them back on the shelves, saying, “I love this, but I don’t have\u00a0little children in my life anymore.” Good news, my friends: Picture books are not just for children, especially now.
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\nWhy have we\u00a0come to a place where\u00a0picture books are relegated to the landscape only of the very young? It was not always thus. We didn’t used to hurry children away from picture books into beginning readers and chapter books at age six, the way most parents do now. As a 10-year-old who avidly read novels, I still spent dreamy time absorbed in Remy Charlip’s clever\u00a0Arm in Arm<\/em>, and often revisited old favorite\u00a0picture books from my younger years. But there’s so much competitive school-related pressure and anxiety that we often overhear adults saying to their kids, who have come up to them hopefully with a picture book in hand, “Put that away. It’s a baby book.” (Oh, the sorrow!)
\nParents often dismiss picture books as an entire class\u2014not registering their relative complexities, subtleties, and nuances. They don’t want to spend money on books they think are beneath their children’s intellectual capacities.\u00a0Even in the\u00a0span of time I’ve been a bookseller (22 years), I’ve seen word counts shrink\u00a0and parents push their children out of picture books younger and younger. They may not understand that the language in picture books\u00a0may be much more sophisticated than the chapter books they are eager for their kids to read.
\nAt the same time we are rushing kids out of picture books, we are creating more and more picture books that appeal primarily to adults. Some of this has to do with the\u00a0greater respect given to creators\u00a0of children’s books\u00a0in recent years (which may have to do with public awareness and appreciation of the vast amounts of money generated by a few children’s book creators). More and more, we are seeing artists from the adult art world venture into children’s books \u2014 and because their primary focus is and has been art, not children,\u00a0their work is unapologetically aimed at other adults. (For instance, meta elements in picture books often seem to me to be a wink\u00a0to the artist’s adult pals more than to kids, the way cartoon feature film artists pop all kinds of\u00a0sly content into their works to appeal to adult audiences. But that’s another post.)
\nI’d love to find a way to\u00a0recalibrate our culture’s approach to picture books.
\nThe Stuff of Stars<\/em> by Marion Dane Bauer\u00a0and artist Ekua Holmes is extraordinary:
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\nIts artistry is beyond fabulous!\u00a0And \u2014 it resonates\u00a0primarily with\u00a0readers who are older than the usual picture-book-aged audience. Most\u00a0young children (in our experience)* do not connect strongly with this art. Why can’t we better validate this book as a gift adults would buy for themselves, other adults, and slightly older children?\u00a0There is ART going on, and there are eyes and minds that appreciate it. I think of picture books like poetry; they are of infinite variety, with infinite capacity to reach readers.
\nAnother beautiful, beautiful book is:
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\nThe Fox and the Star<\/em> by Coralie Bickford-Smith\u00a0is a visually stunning book that could rest on its art alone, but has simple, restrained and lovely text that in places is a\u00a0spiritual descendant of Saint-Exup\u00e9ry’s\u00a0The Little Prince<\/em>.\u00a0Each page is such a pleasure!
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\nThis book seems like one that would enrapture any viewer, but one of our staff had been given it as a gift, and her three-year-old and just-turned-six-year-old just were. not. interested, nor were their friends. It was a surprise to all of us. I suspect this book would find its happiest home with seven-year-olds and up, including and perhaps especially adults.
\nSome other examples of recent books that may resonate more with older readers than young include several of Chris Van Allsburg’s titles,\u00a0Me and My Fear<\/em>\u00a0and The Journey<\/em> by Francesca Sanna,\u00a0The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles<\/em> by Michelle Cuevas and Erin E. Stead, Cry, Heart, But Never Break<\/em> by Glenn Ringtved and Charlotte Pardi (translated by Robert Moulthrop), and many more.
\nSomehow, Shaun Tan has managed to carve out this magical territory. Perhaps because he burst onto the scene with a firm anchor in young adult literature, his subsequent picture books have been accepted as older picture books without any confusion.
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\nMelissa Sweet’s art\u00a0toes a fascinating line \u2014 her bright\u00a0palette, intriguing details,\u00a0and\u00a0friendly people are magical to children, but their complexity\u2014and sometimes their topics\u2014reward an adult sensibility. (I will forever in my life buy any new book illustrated by Melissa Sweet. She is one of a kind.) I’m not sure if children will adore Kwame Alexander and Sweet’s\u00a0upcoming June\u00a0release, How to Read a Book,<\/em> as much as adults will appreciate it, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
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\nAwards, happily, do help support sales of these books. The New York Times<\/em> Best Illustrated annual lists, for example, are often populated with picture books that may have mostly an adult appreciation. But even though these awards mean many people will buy them, I still think these books are\u00a0most often mistakenly given to the wrong age group, who don’t love them, and miss the audiences who will.
\nI love the idea that one of my colleagues had. Bookseller Ruth Hulbert turned one of her picture book spinner’s pockets into a picture book section for adults. She put it at adult eye level with some of their favorite picture books and a sign that read,\u00a0 “Why let kids have all the fun? Here are some picture books adults will also love!”
\n* Before I get comments about\u00a0four-year-olds who can’t get enough of the books mentioned in this post, and I believe there are certainly children who do love them, I am talking about the overwhelming rule rather than the exception. Artist Tracey Campbell Pearson used to drag around a beloved, tattered, slept-with copy of\u00a0The Art of El Greco <\/em>when she was three, and was devastated when it was lost. However,\u00a0El Greco\u00a0is not likely to be most toddlers’ go-to bedtime book.
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