PICTURE BOOKS:Given a chance, young children, who are visually literate, are more than capable of taking control and choosing what they like, writes NIAMH SHARKEY
CHILDREN ARE visually literate, and make excellent book choices given half a chance. The failing is often with adults choosing the cliched fairy and truck books. When children are left to choose their own titles, they can often make surprising discoveries for themselves. It is a great way of letting them take control.
Children don’t read the blurb, they don’t read the publishers’ bumf or care what prizes a title has won. Most of the small ones can’t read. So what do they do? They read pictures; they judge a book by its cover, and they go with their gut instinct.
So with this in mind I conducted an experiment. When all the review copies came in from The Irish Times,I placed them randomly around the room. I wanted to see what my kids, picture-book readers, Oscar aged five and Aoibhe aged three, were immediately drawn to. Neither of them can read yet.
Oscar, after studying each page carefully and not uttering a word for 20 minutes, announced that "This book is a 20 out of 10". Joyce Dunbar's The Monster Who Ate Darkness(Walker Books, £10.99) finds an innovative way of exploring well-worn material; she recasts the monster of her story as a kind of childlike magical helper. Taiwanese illustrator Jimmy Liao paints crisp watercolours, the abstract notion of "eating darkness" didn't seem to confuse.
The story unfolds like a dream in which the monster’s appetite is shown to be without bounds, mostly through vignettes with white borders. This book was brought to bed and stored under the pillow for repeated readings.
Hannah Shaw's mischievous Erroll(Jonathan Cape, £10.99 ) tickled Oscar's funny bones. It's the story of Bob, who finds a squirrel in his packet of Nutti Nuts. For the next week Oscar kept expecting little critters to pop out of his cereal box.
Weaving his spell in scratchy lines, inky subdued tones and paint splattered pages, John Burningham in It's A Secret(Walker Books, £11.99) also captured Oscar's imagination. One night Marie Elaine finds her cat, Malcolm, dressed for a party. Marie Elaine begs to be taken. Malcolm agrees – as long as she puts on her fancy clothes, gets small, and keeps it all a secret. "Look, this is a very exciting bit!" Oscar said, pointing to Malcolm and Marie Elaine scaling a crane. After explaining to me that "a secret is telling someone by whispering in the ear", Oscar and Aoibhe made their own It's A Secretbook out of paper and markers, and with their own secrets.
Aoibhe, looking at the cover art, wanted to know which ones were for girls and which ones for boys. She picked up most of the titles announcing that she only wanted to read “girl-ones”. But, contrary to her comment, she chose lots of the not-so-girly ones.
SHE GRAVITATED TOWARDSTasha Pym's Have You Ever Seen A Sneep?(Doubleday, £10.99 ) even though it had a muted cover and soft illustrations by Joel Stewart. She giggled her way through the book, pointing at the funny characters.
Aoibhe also loved Julia Donaldson's What The Ladybird Heard(Macmillan, £10.99 ). The vibrant illustrations by Lydia Monks are certainly a glittery affair. You have to find a tactile, sparkly ladybird on every page. It hooked the three-year-old. My eyes were prized open early the next morning by small fingers, and a small voice asked: "Mum, can you find the ladybird?"
Another tactile affair was Milo Armadillo(Walker Books, £10.99), written and illustrated by Jan Fearnley. It's about learning to love things for what they are. Aoibhe tried to pick up the pieces of fabric collage and the text designed from twisty-turny wool.
The absolute hit with both Oscar and Aoibhe was The Monster Who Ate Darkness. Aoibhe told me that "he licks the darkness up".
She pointed to the illustration of the monster cradling Jo-Jo in his arms and said, “Darkness come out of that guy, and go back to where it was in the sky. I love this!”.
It can be hard to stop yourself from rolling your eyes at their choices and putting them back on the shelf before making a more consideredselection. But set them free in a library or bookstore. Don't butt in, let the child make the choice.
Niamh Sharkey is an author and picture book illustrator