Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts ed. by Janet Evans (review)

In Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks, Janet Evans has brought together a fascinating introduction to the wilder shores of picture book publishing. She has recruited a multinational band of contributors—British, North American, Italian, Portuguese, German, and Norwegian—who offer discussions and analyses of books, many of which I suspect are little known in North America and Britain. As a result there is much to ponder here, as much to disagree as to agree with, and—as I rapidly discovered—much to learn. Evans has done the study of this aspect of children’s literature a great favor, not least in supplying an extensive bibliography and ensuring that the collection is generously illustrated.

From the outset, this reader was struck by just how insular is the world of Anglo-American picture book publishing. There are no translations of many of the books gathered here, and the books are frequently hard to obtain in their original languages as well. This is a great shame, for the products of the Scandinavian and continental European publishing industries appear at times to be quite extraordinary. Under the circumstances, one might expect the contributors to the book to have differing views of their subject, but the pervading tone of the book is one of uniform, calm analysis (entirely appropriate, of course, from the scholarly point of view). It made me wonder, however, why there was so little expression of astonishment, excitement, or even puzzlement on the part of some of the authors. I also wondered why there was no sign of any critical objection, either. Such a thing is allowed, after all—more on this later.

After her first broad sweep of the terrain, Evans eases readers in gently with a contribution from Perry Nodelman, who looks for signs of the controversial in popular, apparently non-controversial old favorites (whose old favorites? one might ask). “Controversy is in the eye of the beholder. . . . all books are at least potentially controversial,” Nodelman writes, acknowledging that books like “Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever and Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny [are] perennial bestsellers that have also been perennially controversial” (36). (In a sense this is an argument already won and a position already established, as Andersen Press publisher Klaus Flugge makes plain in the illuminating interview that ends the book; Flugge notes that David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard, first published by Andersen Press in 1980, was once considered by many to be well beyond the pale. It now stands as a classic of its kind.) In unearthing the shock within the familiar, Nodelman has a point well worth making. Controversy and challenge are always in and of their time.

As we read on, it becomes clear that it is among adult readers that controversies, rather than mere disagreements, arise. Elizabeth Marshall’s work with trainee teachers makes this explicit. Marshall finds her students more concerned about the lurid content of Aaron Frisch and illustrator Roberto Innocenti’s “Little Red Riding Hood” retelling, The Girl in Red, than the children interviewed about the book and referenced in her chapter’s endnote. The same point is readily inferred from the chapters written by Sandy Mourao, Kerenza Ghosh, Sylvia Pantaleo, and Marnie Campagnaro. All include transcriptions of children discussing books including Antoine Guillope’s potentially ambiguous Loup Noir, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s haunting The Wolves in the Walls, John Kelly and Cathy Tincknell’s wolf-mafia comedy Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner, Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree, and Fabian Negrin’s retelling of Charles Dickens’ Bluebeard story, Capitan Omicidio. The transcripts give no sense that the children find these picture books at all horrifying, in the way adults seem likely to do. The young readers disagree about interpretation from time to time, but nothing more.

If the controversies tend to be outside the classroom (“How dare you publish a book like that!” fulminated one librarian about Not Now, Bernard), the challenges are, too...