From Word To Word

Finding books that entertain both a four year old boy and his parents can sometimes be difficult, particularly when most of the books that are now being produced for this age group are based on super hero movies or television shows that are dumbed down to the lowest possible level.  These books are so focused on being educational that they have lost any sense of plot, characterization, or imagination.  They impress anxious parents because they are labeled with a reading level and because they use various techniques that claim to help children learn to read, but they certainly do not help children to move beyond reading as a technique toward reading as a passion.

This is why I was so pleased to find The Fog Mound series by Susan Schade and Jon Butler.  It is comprised of three books, Travels of Thelonious, Faradawn, and Simon’s Dream, its chapters alternating between graphic novel and illustrated narrative, and it was recommended to me by John Jantunen, whose four year old son it entertained before mine.  It is a post-apocalyptic narrative, set in a world where humans are extinct but where some of the animals have developed the ability to speak and to handle human tools.  It is vastly imaginative and vastly entertaining, with a decaying human city, and a secret animal community atop a fog shrouded plateau, and a mysterious island threatened by mutant crabs, and a tiny scientist who just may be the last surviving human being on earth.

This is the sort of imagination that captures the attention of a child, and of a parent also.  It is the sort of story that finds its purpose in being a story rather than in trying to be merely educational.  My oldest son, who generally prefers me to read him non-fiction books about space stations or knights or crocodiles, is entranced.  He would finish a book a night if his parents had the time and the stamina to read it to him.  He literally begs me to keep reading  at the end of each chapter.  He has even offered to trade snacks and television privileges in exchange for additional chapters.  He may not be learning to read any faster, but he is learning to love reading, and this brings his father much happiness.

Now, all that being said, I would not put The Fog Mound on the same level as some of my own childhood favourites.  Its story moves too quickly at times, and the plot is often unfocused, including too many tenuously related elements.  The art is good but not exceptional, at its best in the larger panels of strange new locations, and at its worst in the sections of dialogue where it becomes repetitive and visually redundant.  The characters are far fuller than most children’s fare, but they do not exactly attain to complex personalities either.  The writing style is generally strong, refusing to make its vocabulary or its sentence structure too simplistic, but it is dialogue heavy, so it often falls short of creating a real narrative atmosphere.

These criticisms, however, should not obscure what the series does very well: it revels in story and in imagination, and this is what a children’s book should do, before everything else, because the function of children’s literature is to inspire a love for reading not to facilitate a mere technical literacy.   The books that birthed this love in me were those that cast me into story and into imagination, even and especially when they were beyond my reading level.  I remember the Narnian books, and The Hobbit, and The Wind in the Willows, and the stories of the Green Forest, and many others.  These are not stories that aim to teach children to read.  They are stories that aim to tell children stories, and this is enough, more than enough, because children will learn to read if they have something worth reading, and they will also learn what it means to imagine and to tell stories themselves, and this is more important still.