Children’s books must bear many re-readings
Lesley Cowling
The words “bedtime story” conjure up a cosy picture: mom or dad cuddled up in bed with little one, both happily absorbed in a book. The reality, of course, is quite different. The child, instead of falling off to sleep after one reading, insists on hearing the story again … and again … and again, to the increasing desperation of the parent.
Children like repetition, but reading “See Rex. See Rex jump,” 100 times can wear adult nerves to a frazzle. The trick is to get your child books that use language in an interesting way. Stories that have rhyme or rhythm are much more fun for the adult reader, and children love them (they may even be lulled to sleep).
A sure-fire winner for reading aloud is The Giraffe Who Got in a Knot by Paul Geraghty and John Bush (Red Fox). The story of Cardwell, a giraffe who accidentally gets his neck in knot while feasting on camel-thorn trees, is reminiscent in its rhythm of children’s rhyming tales like “Mathilda told such dreadful lies/ it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes”. But there’s a happy ending, rather than the gruesome moral that Victorians thought necessary to tag on to the end of children’s stories (Mathilda was burnt to death).
Although the book is British in origin, its illustrator, Paul Geraghty, has provided an authentic African landscape to this comical story. The savannah with its sandy grasses, umbrella thorn trees and the odd dead tree dotting the horizon, is beautifully depicted in watercolours. Cardwell was a hit with my two-year-old, who gave him the ultimate accolade of “more giwaffe, more giwaffe”. I suspect, however, that it’s the kind of book that could become a family favourite and accompany a child right up to school and early reading years.
Snake Alley Band by Elizabeth Nygaard, illustrated by Betsy Lewin (Bantam Doubleday Dell), uses a host of shhh-booms, doo-wops and cha-bops rather than rhyme to create its jazzy rhythm, and is an equally enjoyable reading experience. Firmly situated in an American woodland, you can literally hear the Southern twang in this story of the littlest snake in a snake band, who, like most budding musicians, gets some ideas of his own.
This is fundamentally a happy story, with the illustrator managing to get a wide smile and funky attitude into every creature depicted, from snake to cricket. A good story to read to children from age two to seven, but a word of warning – don’t make your shhh-booms and cha-bops too animated. You might find it impossible to keep up the excitement on the 25th read.
There is always a gap between the levels of books read aloud and books children are starting to read themselves, because they can listen to much longer, more complex stories and understand them, but have to regress to short, simple stories to learn to read. A little sly humour and a lot of repetition is therefore always helpful to the process of early reading.
Over the Steamy Swamp, also by Paul Geraghty (Red Fox), has both humour and repetition in its tale of a mosquito in search of a snack. The mosquito is being eyed by a greedy dragonfly, who in turn is being watched by a famished frog, and so it goes on. The chain of prey and predator collapses when the mosquito picks on the predator at the tail, turning food chain into food circle.
Personally, I would have been happier if the mosquito had got it in the end, but I suppose there’s no place for DDT in children’s books. The illustrations here are more cartoon-like than in the giraffe book, and the pictures are vivid and amusing. I’m not sure how ecologically correct the book is (do fish eat frogs?) but it’s great fun and will appeal to the preschool sense of humour.
As recent research has shown that a sense of humour is made, not born, it’s a good thing there is so much humour around in contemporary children’s books. Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper (Picture Corgi Books) gets its laughs from the interaction of text and pictures. A cat, a squirrel and a duck live happily together until the duck decides he wants to be the one to stir the soup they make every day for their supper. Great splashes of pumpkin soup between bits of the text show quite graphically the results of the duck’s endeavours, when he finally gets his way, and the pictures tell their own visual story alongside the written words. Rich autumnal colours are used to depict the animals in their cosy cabin in the woods
The high quality of these books should make having to reread them again and again somewhat easier. Whether they will make it to the 100th reading is something Ihave yet to find out.