Y is for...Why do adults like children’s books?

We may be older than the target audience, but age should never be a barrier for enjoying and appreciating good stories. Picture books, mid-grade, and young adult – the world teems with fantastic children’s fiction, and it's a shame to feel excluded by the amount of candles on a birthday cake. I am equally comfortable reading books by Evelyn Waugh and by Mary Norton on the tube, although get far more looks when seen with the latter.

I adore children’s picture books because I adore illustration. I’ve always enjoyed pictures that tell a story, or tell more of the story than the words beside it. There can be several layers of understanding within a tale, and this can be shown by the illustrations. Children may laugh at the picture of an octopus doing the washing up; adults might laugh at the bottle named ‘Sud Off’.

My love for picture books as an adult seems split between nostalgic memories and darker tales. For the former I enjoy books like The Church Mice by Graham Oakley and Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem. For the latter it would be The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, A Dark Dark Tale by Ruth Brown, or The Rabbits by Shaun Tan. I love the medium of picture books – especially the ones that treat children as intelligent beings who can grasp concepts, as well as understanding their humour. Now I am thinking of any book by Lauren Child – they are a perfect mix of fun language and brilliant illustrations. Even better, the author really knows her audience.

I also love reading and re-reading older children’s books. I collect classic Puffin titles, and enjoy escaping occasionally back into that world. Children’s books by their very nature are often seen as ‘light’ reads, yet they can be just as hard hitting as their adult counterparts. There is also a pleasing nostalgic element to some children’s books, which appeals to me. More importantly, some of them are just pure fun!

Do you still read children’s books? If so, which ones? Why do you like them?

Everybody knows that

One of the things I most remember from childhood reading is that a lot of narratives used an all-knowing lofty stance when educating their young readers.

There seemed to be a fashion for informing when writing for children - using the statement ‘but of course, everyone knows that’. Sometimes it would be with a sprinkling of truth, such as the one below:

Percy the kitten went over to the saucer and happily drank the top of the milk (as everyone knows kittens like that bit best).

Or it would be something quite bizarre, like:

The polar bear was wearing a red woollen scarf (as everyone knows that red is a polar bear’s favourite colour).

The result gave me a slight feeling of inadequacy. I didn’t know that kittens like the top of the milk, or that a polar bear's favourite colour was red. But the author has just told me ‘everyone’ knows – you mean to say no one told me? Everyone knew apart from me? I viewed books as all-powerful guides – if they said ‘everyone knows’ then surely they must be correct, on both the statement, and the fact that everyone around me were surely information hogging gits. Text printed in a book meant Truth, Justice and The American Way. Well, perhaps not the latter two, but definitely ‘truth’ – unless it was something obviously mad, like Doctor Seuss.

I’d test this ‘everyone knows’ theory by asking my mother, not yet realising this would ultimately confuse me further. No, she didn’t seem to know that polar bears like red woollen scarves, but she did know cats liked the creamy top of the milk. My mother was the voice of adult reason, twenty foot tall, and my light shining ahead on the path to adulthood (which explains A LOT!). So I’d go back to the book, unable to dismiss the statements as one of those baffling jokes adults like to play on children, and equally unable to totally believe them to be gospel.

As I got older I saw through them for the author trick they were, but I do remember that perplexing time of wondering whether I was the only one in the world who didn’t know, and wanting to believe polar bears only liked red scarves.

So it starts again…

I’ve done it! A whole six weeks (yup - count them!) in an office with people and printers and sweets and spreadsheets and meetings and marbles (actually no marbles – that was just to keep you on your toes). It was great fun to be this efficient office lass with her pashmina for a while but oh the relief of going back to being me – back to being creative, back with my writing and books, back in my flat, back to my story.

The budget has now been shored up with sticks, and I have a month or two clear to get my red pen busy with editing. I have also successfully pitched an idea to a London magazine that I cannot wait to get cracking on (quirky London history is my forte!), and in the near dim and distant future will be editing a factual book that should test my subbing skills. Bring it on, is what I say! Oh yes.

I got talking to a children’s book author the other day (as you do) and gave him one of my children’s book ideas to see what he thought. It was really interesting advice (basically keep working on it, try and develop a ‘voice’, think whether a publisher can see more than one story in you) but it was what he said about the illustrations that really struck home. I had experimented with a new style for two of them, and one he liked, and the other he didn’t, and he pointed out the bits in the picture that didn’t work for him. I instantly saw where I had gone wrong – I had run out of steam, and had finished it hurriedly, instead of really working on it. This worries me slightly, as I knew that with that particular drawing, yet I still showed it to him, and presented it as ‘finished’ when in reality, it needed more time. I’m not altogether sure with these children’s books of mine – they were something I did at University and I think they need ‘a lot’ of work to get them up to scratch – the picture book market is very, very tough. Something to pop on the back burner, maybe…

In the meantime the flat is a tip. Me and J have been scudding in and out of the flat like clouds across the sky over the last few weeks and the result is little pockets of mess everywhere I look. So it appears my first job will be a spring clean, followed by a scrub – and that is just me! My hair is starting to look like an unravelled brillo pad, it has been so long since I last had it cut. So I have decided tomorrow is to be a day of treats – new hair, new clothes, new shoes (well, why the devil not!) and then I can really settle down. I have a bundle of old newspapers dating back to the 1700’s to work my way through – friend C’s mum and dad have a house that is part home / part amazing museum. They let me borrow a suitcase full of old treasure… erm, newspapers, to see if there are any from 1940's etc to help the book, but apparently they go back even further than that, something that keeps the historian in me very happy indeed. I have also been collecting old books on different decades from various charity shops – oh yes, my home library is alive and thriving. J is thrilled, I tell you. Thrilled.