Young children don’t need pandemics to remind them that life can turn unpredictable and terrifying. They have nursery rhymes like “Rock-a-Bye Baby” and “Ring Around the Rosie” for that — not to mention their own helter-skelter adventures.
While children’s stories and rhymes that serve up spoonfuls of comfort are nothing new either, a growing number of post-pandemic picture books seem precision-tooled to pre-empt specific childhood fears with soft-edged scenarios that encourage and reassure. These two books about falling and being scarily on one’s own exemplify the well-meaning but sometimes overly message-y trend.
In MAMA IN THE MOON (Rocky Pond, 40 pp., $18.99, ages 2 to 5), written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Brian Cronin, a mother sloth and her shaggy-furred cub become temporarily separated when the latter accidentally falls from their treetop home after dark. Sloths are wiry, slo-mo mammals that hold predators at bay by hanging out in the leafy canopy of the tropical rainforests of Central and South America. These languid aerialists have a built-in knack for landing well — which, as an author’s note assures readers, is a fortunate thing given their lifelong propensity for tumbling to the ground, once a week on average.
Even had the sloth not been uncharitably named after one of early Christianity’s seven deadly sins, it would hardly be considered a role model. But Doreen Cronin has found a clever, charming way to blend sloth nature and human nature in a story about a loving parent who, being constitutionally incapable of rushing to her frightened child’s (or anyone’s) side, keeps a tender and calming conversation going with him as she slouches to the rescue.
Wisely, the mother sloth distracts her stranded little one by diverting his attention to a handful of in-the-moment sights, sounds and smells. “I’m closer, Baby,” she says from partway down the tree. “I’m close enough to smell the flowers opening for the night. Can you smell them, too?”
At the mention of flowers, scattered explosions of color light up the nocturnal landscape that Brian Cronin has otherwise painted as a series of harmonious black-and-midnight-blue silhouettes, the better to make the story’s frizzy, moon-faced protagonists pop. We might wish the printer had reached for deeper, more velvety blacks and darker, more shimmering blues. Even so, Cronin’s art draws us into a world that’s well worth exploring — a world, readers learn along the way, in which an occasional spill is the price of admission.
The brown bear cub in SOMETIMES WE FALL (Random House Studio, 40 pp., $19.99, ages 4 to 8), written by Randall de Sève and illustrated by Kate Gardiner, is strong and agile enough to climb a plum tree under the watchful eye of its mama, who sits on a high branch “munching ripe purple fruit.” The cub is also developmentally aware enough to imagine what could go wrong.
Falling is very much on its mind: “What if it rains, and I grip and slip and scratch my paws?” To which the mama bear reasonably replies, “Sometimes we slip and scratch our paws. … It’s OK.”
Will the bear cub put its worries aside and literally go out on a limb for a plum of its own?
All children know fears like these; some fixate on the what-ifs more intensely than others. But is an earnest exchange like the one played out here really the best way to allay their concerns?
Edward Gorey once told an interviewer, “If a book is only about what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.” Perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but the fact remains that good intentions alone don’t make good stories. And children learn best not when they know they’re being taught but when they feel they’re being let into the game.
Gardiner’s pared-down gouache and colored-pencil art casts a soothing spell that’s well matched to the worthwhile goal of offering anxious, risk-averse youngsters the psychic space to come to their own conclusions in their own time. Her graceful close-up drawing of a dangling plum, which readers discover upon opening the book, is food for thought even if you’re not a bear.
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