Picture Books: Robert Dunbar picks the best of the recent publications which combine rich and subtle texts with imaginative artwork
Contemporary picture books come in such a variety of shapes and sizes that generalised comments about the genre are necessarily risky and problematic. What can be said, however, is that the best of such books combine high production values with texts which are rich and subtle and artwork which is fresh and imaginative. Lower down the ladder of attainment are those books which merely revisit popular themes (anthropomorphism is a particular favourite) in styles which are frequently garish or which reinforce popular stereotypes. The six books reviewed here belong, to varying degrees, to the first of these categories.
Widely regarded as one of the master picture book practitioners since the publication of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in 1970, Eric Carle makes his 2005 debut with 10 Little Rubber Ducks (HarperCollins, £12.99). Based, apparently, on an actual news item, this relates the adventures of the eponymous ducks as they find themselves cast adrift on a sea crossing, adventures which will, amusingly, involve nine of them in a series of encounters with other creatures. But what of the 10th? "As far as one can see - only water and sky, water and sky." From within these elements Carle fashions, in the multi-coloured textures of his collages, a resolution that will delight his young readers.
In Chris Wormell's The Sea Monster (Cape, £10.99) it is a young boy's yacht that is "carried out among the waves", the prelude to a story of rescue and (partial) reunion. This strong and atmospheric narrative, its mood well matched in the swirling blues and greens of Wormell's seascape, gains much of its power from the "monster" of its title, a creature who spookily sits "among the waving kelp" and keeps an eye on events unfolding in its watery domain. The human and elemental aspects of the story are skilfully interwoven, reflecting also the relationships between picture and text.
"Scribbly, scrawly and sketchy round the eyes", the canine hero of Emma Dodson's Badly Drawn Dog (Hodder, £10.99) is in search of a new image. His quest takes him on several visits to an artist's studio, where he is transformed into various alternative doggy modes, each mischievously modelled on the style of a particular painter; time, however, is to prove, reassuringly, that it is his original portrayal as "one big friendly smudge" that will have lasting appeal. In a book which is essentially about playing with appearances, it is appropriate that in its layout, typography and generally zany detail it should be so vibrantly distinctive.
Creativity and transformation lie also at the heart of Joel Stewart's Me and My Mammoth (Macmillan, £9.99), in which a young boy's artistic efforts have the knack of ending up spectacularly different from what he had intended. Even a model aeroplane kit turns out to assume the shape of a woolly mammoth, on which the boy will be transported to the Arctic to win an ice-sculpture competition! In both text and picture this is a gloriously inventive book which, though largely comic in tone, has also much light to throw on the serendipity of childhood dreams and their fulfilment.
The humour in the rhyming text of Colin McNaughton's When I Grow Up (Walker, £10.99) is broader than Stewart's, the childhood dreams more directly focused, the artwork more in the style of a comic cartoon. Presented as a school musical in which the children take it in turn to reveal their ambitions, the format provides McNaughton with the opportunity for a succession of career cameos, ranging from the girl who wants to be an angel to the boy who wants to be an Elvis lookalike. As for the child who screams hysterically that he does not want to grow up at all, the sympathetic teacher wisely suggests: "Enjoy your childhood while you may/Growing up is years away!"
Fans of the picture books of Anthony Browne are unlikely to be disappointed by My Mum (Doubleday, £10.99), though this is a work which concentrates on his summery side and leaves behind the darker allusive surrealism of some of his other texts. What we have instead is a tribute to a particularly versatile and gifted mother, presented in a sequence of wittily conceived and executed portraits: her extravagantly floral overall (prefigured in the book's end-papers) is the recurring motif which, in its various guises, becomes the symbol of her benign and loving disposition. "She is really, REALLY nice, my mum," proclaims the caption to one of the most dramatic pictures; we have little difficulty believing it.
Robert Dunbar is Head of English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin