The spoon’s best-known role in the annals of children’s literature is as the dish’s paramour. But the spoon can be more than a consort. In Amy Krause Rosenthal’s classic tale of identity crisis, the titular implement has thoughts and feelings. (Spoon wants to be a fork.) It is exceedingly rare, however, for this most well-rounded of utensils to be considered not a character with agency but an object to use — you know, like a spoon. In part that’s because we tend to remake everything in our own image, as if it’s somehow comforting — rather than terrifying — to think of spoons (and sausages and scissors and seeds) as sentient. It’s also infinitely more difficult to craft a narrative around a soulless, spoony spoon: humble, edgeless, concave, mute.
What makes THE SPOON (Crocodile Books, 40 pp., $14.95, ages 5 to 7), a newly translated picture book by the Argentine writer Sandra Siemens, so admirable is that its spoon is just an object. No cute eyes or twiggy limbs or jaunty smile. The tension of the story isn’t what the spoon can do but what one can do with the spoon.
The answer, in this case, is not much. This spoon is a small silver one, a wedding gift brought by the young protagonist’s great-grandmother to a new country after an unnamed war. And as the girl learns, the spoon’s uses are now proscribed: It’s not meant to stir soup, dig holes or make music. It’s so precious it must be kept sequestered in a drawer and admired — robbed, therefore, of its spooniness. For the child, unfreighted by the ossifying tendencies of intergenerational trauma and the paralysis of accumulated meaning, this sucks. “I don’t think I want a spoon like that,” she says, “a spoon that’s not to be used.”
Despite the Corporate-Memphis-style illustrations by Bea Lozano, which one could imagine on a mural in the lobby of a tech startup, “The Spoon” is remarkably profound. What use is an object? How do we balance the weight of the past with the desires of the present? What do we owe to the stories that brought us here? Siemens manages to pose these questions in simple, spare language. “It reminds me of a shell that carries the sounds of the sea,” she writes. “I put the spoon to my ear, but it’s quiet. For now, it doesn’t have anything to say.” Thankfully, that’s not the case with the book. It’s an elegant and wise work, capable of delivering oceans of meaning in easily consumed spoonfuls.
An object’s uses and history are also at the center of THE TABLE (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 56 pp., $19.99, ages 4 to 8), the wildly creative new picture book from Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illustrated by Jason Griffin. Bingham, whose first book, “Soul Food Sunday,” was a colorful evocation of a cookout, here turns to Appalachia, to which she immigrated from Jamaica when she was a child. Blevins, meanwhile, is an early reading specialist and serial children’s author who comes from a family of coal miners in West Virginia.
Bingham and Blevins put a lot on the table here. As the narrative, such as it is, traces the passing of a kitchen table from one family to another, the table becomes a stage on which various tableaus are mounted. (Griffin keeps our gaze fixed firmly on the table. No characters, save for a dog, are pictured.)
In the first family, of white Appalachian coal miners, peas need eating; a dress needs sewing; a book needs reading aloud, since Meemaw is illiterate; bills need paying. When Papa loses his job, enough of those bills aren’t paid that the family lose their home. They move into a smaller place: “We all fit, except the table.”
The exiled table “finds a new place to stand on the side of the road,” where soon it is claimed by another family. Black and seemingly less impoverished, they too play out their domestic life atop the table. Across its surface more memories are formed: crossword puzzles worked on, math homework done, biscuits eaten, beef stew slurped.
As the table changes owners, so too does the storytelling. Hands that were white are now Black. Mamma becomes Momma. Papa becomes Daddy. Only the “I,” though differently voiced — and the hand-lettered, cutout text style — remain the same. This is as tidy a metaphor for commonality as you’ll find outside a stump speech.
In the gymnastic narrative switcheroo, one can smell the pipe smoke of William Faulkner, avant-garde bard of the South. In the grace said at the table in its second home, in the cadence of the second father’s speech, one can hear whispers of Albert Murray’s “South to a Very Old Place.” “Baby, I’ve been a carpenter all my life,” Daddy says. “This table’s seen a lot of things. Done been ’round for a long, long time.”
“The Table” is innovative, complex and touching. It’s full of clever parallels, poetic language and melancholic beauty. But other than where it’s shelved and how it’s marketed, it’s not a children’s book. That is, it’s not likely to appeal to young children, at least not the 4- to 8-year-olds who are supposedly its target demographic. The allusions, the presupposed knowledge, the abrupt shift in narrative viewpoint, the lack of pictured characters — all these conspire to keep the meaning and pleasures of the text out of reach for most little ones.
A children’s book needn’t be — and shouldn’t be — facile, with all the questions answered or, even worse, with none posed. It needn’t be slow; it should move, like a merry-go-round, but at a pace that allows a reader to hop on.
Books like “The Table” move so fast — beautiful and shimmering in the light of their own brilliance — that there’s nothing to do but to stand back and admire them from afar. One wishes it could learn from “The Spoon” that an object lives when it’s used, not when it’s kept in a drawer or on a shelf to be admired.
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