Simply had to
I only very rarely review picture books here, although I have enormous admiration for many illustrators. I do buy picture books quite regularly for my grandchildren and know that there are many wonderful ones about, but my prime interest in MG and YA fiction does take up most of my reading and reviewing time.
However, there is something about this particular picture book by Jon Klassen that I find almost unspeakably wonderful and I feel compelled to try to record my thoughts about it. I also feel its appeal will be completely unrelated to age, so it could just as easily be MG or YA as anything else. But don’t underestimate children’s ability to respond too.
I actually know Jon Klassen’s work best from his remarkably strong covers and affecting illustrations for Sara Pennypacker’s wonderful novels*. However, he has also created many deservedly acclaimed picture books of his own, not least those about a bear and a hat (or rather a bear without a hat, not to mention a hat without a bear).**
This new book really is something though.
Simply wonderful
Like all the very best picture books it is a just about perfect amalgam of words and visual images. A version of a Tyrolean Folktale, John Klassen admits in his afterword that he has altered it considerably, and I suspect the things that so excite me are more his than anyone else’s.
You might think that a tale of a young, runaway girl finding a skull (and later a skeleton) in a strange, isolated house would be macabre, if not sinister. Actually, I find this verbal/visual text more surreal than spooky. In fact, the matched simplicity of the words and limited-palate images are if anything rather charming, and the direct, honest and, yes, warm relationship between the girl and the skull, even approaching sweet, endearing. What they find is warmth in a shared life in contrast to the chill greyness of their separate ones, and the artist’s colouring reflects this touchingly.
This little book is enigmatic. It affected me deeply. It asks many questions, but is that not what a book should do? It is also hauntingly beautiful, in a rather strange way. It is strange. But such a wonderful strange,
The book’s compelling simplicity feels as if it is resonant with meaning, if only you knew what it was. Like good folk tales it will mean different things to different people. Like every good book (and I think this is one heck of a good book) it will be read in a different way by every reader - as long as they bring themselves to it. In this way it reminded me of another of my all time favourite (children’s) books, Dave Shelton’s A Boy and a Bear in a Boat.
Only a great artist and writer can fill simplicity with as much as Jon Klassen does here. I can see The Skull gaining the sort of popularity and status of, say, Where the Wild Things Are. It should.
* Pax; Pax, Journey Home; Here in the Real World
** I Want My Hat Back; This Is Not My Hat; We Found A Hat
