Families: Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And who, besides long-term analysands, knows that better than kids tasting independence by pushing against those messy, sticky and — best-case scenario — nurturing bonds? It’s a theme that underscores shelves and shelves’ worth of classic children’s literature.
Three terrific new books — each a marvel of imagination, sensitivity and craft — take up the baton. All contain art so thematically and visually audacious that, if I didn’t quite gasp when I first turned the pages, I mouthed a silent “whoa.” Or laughed out of sheer delight.
Among the trio, Christian Robinson’s DAD (Balzer + Bray, 48 pp., $19.99, ages 3 to 6) addresses the youngest audience. Robinson is one of the 21st century’s foremost picture-book makers, illustrating his own stories as well as others’ — notably Matt de la Peña’s “Last Stop on Market Street,” for which Robinson was a Caldecott honoree (and de la Peña won a Newbery Medal). His new book’s text and premise are simple: Short sentences detailing fatherly attributes are juxtaposed with illustrations of animal dads (and a few human ones) rendered in his trademark mix of collage and paint.
For “Dad is strong,” Robinson offers a wary-looking gorilla, his body as heavy and graceful as a Henry Moore sculpture, standing guard over his child. You can feel the strength in the ape’s massive forearms, and the love in the sheltering curves of his back and shoulders.
“Dad holds on tight” depicts a papa seahorse with a baby in his pouch, his tail clutching a strand of seaweed. The ocean depths are ebony black, so we can only sense the threat of a strong current in the bending seaweed and the protective tension in the silvery seahorse’s spiny body. It’s a sublime composition.
Though “Dad” leans more into attachment than testing family bonds, Robinson wisely acknowledges that fathers may have shortcomings. “Dad needs lots of space.” (Illustration: a toothy, grimacing shark.) “Dad lets you down.” (A carefree gibbon ignoring his charge.)
“Dad had to go away” depicts two owlets left behind in their nest. Behind them, a jagged opening to the sky feels like a wound. In a letter included with reviewers’ copies, Robinson writes that his own father “wasn’t around growing up, and I am not yet a dad myself.” For me, that bit of back story makes a remarkable book even more remarkable.
Did I mention messy, sticky bonds? The debut author-illustrator Jaque Jours makes them literal in THE MUÉGANOS (Transit Children’s Editions, 48 pp., $20.95, ages 3 and up), a wonderfully droll book about a rabbit family named for a “traditional Mexican candy made of small, square pieces of fried wheat dough, stuck together with honey or piloncillo syrup.” (Jewish readers may be reminded of teiglach.)
As portrayed in Jours’s mixed-media art, the five Muéganos — Papá, Mamá and three children, including Julia, our protagonist — are joined together at the shoulders, the bunnies’ feet dangling amusingly in the air. “They are never apart,” she writes. “Papá Muégano says honey glues them together. Mamá says it’s love. Julia thinks it is a little boring.”
And there, fiction workshoppers and child-psychology students, is your primal conflict!
One day, while visiting a museum, Julia’s “simple urge” to wander off by herself and see what she wants to see is so strong that it makes “something crack.” Jours depicts the family starting to splinter and then, with the page turn, a stunning image: a tiny but big-eyed Julia alone in a black void that also suggests a torn page. Is she exhilarated, terrified or merely startled? Probably all three.
Back home, the family tries to repair the breach, but “some things are just inevitable,” a truth Jours illustrates with broken Delft-style crockery. Her ending is a happy one, though. Genuinely loving families learn to allow breathing room.
Sara Lundberg’s NOBODY BUT ME (Triangle Square, 64 pp., $21.95, ages 4 to 7), translated by B.J. Woodstein, is a masterpiece with a wordless middle section that defies easy summary.
One summer day a little boy visits a lake with his mom. Itching to do something by himself, he unties a small inflatable raft and drifts off — in the literal sense but also, maybe, in the sleepy sense. Gentle (at first) waters carry him on a dreamlike journey through an enveloping forest and then into the wider world, where, among other things, he finds love (or at least friendship) and danger.
But don’t worry: A trio of forest children in leaf skirts — sprites, perhaps — serve as guardians and keep trouble from getting out of hand. Changed but unchanged, the boy drifts back to his mom clutching a seed, which he plants when they return home. It too will grow.
Lundberg, a beloved and well-honored Swedish picture-book maker, works here in a vivid, liquid, painterly style that reminds me of David Hockney’s late-period landscapes; you want to dive in.
“Nobody but Me” won’t be for every kid, or adult, but it will touch something in many, even if they don’t yet know what that something is.
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