I am old enough to remember a time when we didn’t need books to tell us that greed and lying are bad, when it was assumed children would be taught these lessons by their parents.
Sadly, times have changed. Now it seems necessary to educate children — and their parents — on these subjects.
Lucky for us we have two excellent new books to help us do it.
The Caldecott medalist Chris Raschka’s lightly illustrated novel PEACHALOO IN BLOOM (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 304 pp., $18.99, ages 10 and up) follows a girl named Peachaloo at the magical moment in childhood when she gains both the power to understand “what people really mean, not just what they’re saying,” and a “blooming sense of good and evil” — abilities that will soon be sorely needed in her little town in central Pennsylvania’s Appalachian Mountains.
Raschka’s prose is charming, written in a rural deadpan reminiscent of Kate DiCamillo, and the accompanying drawings are comical and oddball, like many of the novel’s eccentric characters. Occasionally Raschka indulges in playing with the world he’s created rather than pushing the story along, but taking joy in one’s creation is a small sin, and smaller still when the creation is as worthy as the kooky town of Fourwords (whose name refers to the four words carved into the door frames of its oldest buildings: Hope, Faith, Charity and Patience).
Everything in Fourwords is connected, if you piece together the threads, from its mysterious community of “Jumpers” — “like the Shakers, or the Quakers,” except they jump rope — to the notorious local bank robbers who disappeared without a trace.
This quaint burg has been invaded by Major Gasbag, a real estate developer who plans to turn the grounds of the original Jumpers’ former estate — which were left to the town in perpetuity and include Peachaloo’s favorite swimming hole — into a golf course and country club. Major Gasbag seems harmless, “like Santa’s Kentucky cousin,” but secretly he is governed by an overpowering greed. As if he were possessed by a wanting monster.
Which is the premise of a picture book written by Martine Murray and beautifully illustrated by Anna Read. THE WANTING MONSTER (Enchanted Lion, 76 pp., $19.95, ages 6 to 9) tells the story of a town — not very different from Fourwords — where the titular character sets off a mad race among the townspeople to hoard every natural resource for themselves.
The stream is diverted into personal swimming pools. The hills are denuded of wildflowers. All the stars are plucked from the night sky.
The Wanting Monster looks like Maurice Sendak’s Max if he had stayed in the land of the Wild Things and grown into one himself. And as with Max, the key to taming him is showing him a bit of love.
From the first page, a palette of pale greens and blues is threatened by dark clouds hovering over the horizon. As the Wanting Monster pours its greed into the ears of the villagers, the darkness pours over the hills and envelops the village, the pages becoming gorgeous studies in blacks and whites and deep blues.
Both “Peachaloo in Bloom” and “The Wanting Monster” see greed as the cause of the destruction of our planet and the impoverishment of our society. But in “Peachaloo,” the greed belongs to one man — and his hapless political yes-woman, the mayor — while the rest of the town is too divided (and hesitant) to stand up to him. Which certainly feels familiar.
In “The Wanting Monster,” on the other hand, the greed belongs to us all. Each of us in our own way wants to grab something for ourselves. A swimming pool in the yard. A house full of flowers. An armful of stars. It is the aggregation of our desires that exhausts a world that once seemed so large and inexhaustible.
The greed, vanity and gasbaggery of one man can do incalculable damage to our shared world. But it is our small-mindedness, our private lies, our selfish drive for comfort and ease that permit him to do it.
We knew that once.
Now we must start to educate one another again. Let’s begin with the children. And their parents.
The post Mine! Mine! Mine! Children’s Books About Greed appeared first on New York Times.
