BookBrunch

The Kate Greenaway shortlist has picture books for everyone, Nicolette Jones writes

Something significant has happened in this year’s Greenaway shortlist. Two of the books on it are aimed at older children than are two of the books on the Carnegie shortlist. A third is described as for 7+. This should help to put paid, I hope, to the mistaken idea that children who can read have grown out of picturebooks. It would be wonderful if this filtered through to teachers and parents who discourage children as soon as they can sound out words from looking at images made by trained artists who have been practising their skill for a lifetime. Shirley Hughes may have given her painstaking and considered attention to making a picture at the age of 80+, but some adults seem to think it is not worth a glance from seven-year-olds.

The Savage (10+) occupies middle ground between the novel and the graphic novel. Much has been said about how this quality might appeal to reluctant readers, and that is true. But this book does more than just make text accessible. It concerns a boy whose father has died. David Almond, who wrote the story, lost his father when he was 15. Dave McKean, who illustrated it, lost his when he was 12. Some have perceived the illustrations as angry and dark, but McKean, when he read the text, responded to it instantly, and expressed feelings he knew in the pictures; Almond, when he saw McKean’s images, recognised their truth. Quite apart from the skill of the illustration, this book shows readers of any age or level of literacy an emotional reality.

Angela Barrett’s masterly illustrations to The Snow Goose (10+) have an understatedness that perfectly matches the understatedness of American-born Paul Gallico’s language in his account of the relationship between a hunchback and a young girl on the Essex marshes. Many of them in monochrome, these images are miles away from the stereotypical perception of what children’s illustrations might be: they are not cartoons in bubblegum colours, but carefully observed and subtle. They appeal to a sophisticated eye.

No bubblegum colours either in Varmints (for 7+), which has itself opened up a whole new field of artistic development: it is in the process of adaptation for a ballet.

It is not the first time books for older children have been shortlisted for the Greenaway: Chris Riddell won it in 2004 for illustrating Martin Jenkins’ retelling of Gulliver, as did Alan Lee for Black Ships Before Troy in 1993 and Helen Oxenbury for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1999. But I hope this year helps to change attitudes, that it gives publishers the courage to use more illustration in books for 8+ (and not just in the gift editions), that it leads teachers and parents to introduce teenagers to such books as: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival or The Lost Thing or Tales of Outer Suburbia, to Armin Greder’s The Island, to Jeannie Baker’s Belonging … And that it helps everyone to recognise that picturebooks, read as they are by adults to young children, have to appeal to a dual audience, not least because otherwise the adult reading aloud will fail to impart the delight that creates a lifetime’s love of books. Remember that the books on this year’s Greenaway shortlist for 3+ warrant anyone’s scrutiny too.

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