Quartz Sago Serpent Ounce, Dice, Trice. By Alastair Reid. (Dent;
I5s.) AN article on child care recently suggested that children's meals should not be considered as something to be 'got through'--successful if they escaped being frightful. And the same sort of thing could be said about children's books, an enormous number of which are noticeable for nothing but their insipidity. The trouble with Blyton stuff and its like is not so much that it is ill-written and illustrated as that it is "nega- tive, under par : paler, chiller, wishy-washier than the average child; a lazifier, an unflavoured soporific; something that narrows and dilutes the child's world, that never makes him gasp or yelp or roar with laughter or sit feeling rapt and warm i it introduces children before they can resist it to the adult taste for plaster gnomes and spotted toadstools, and their spiritual equivalents.
Positive books, personal and tough books with personality, seem easier to produce at the picture book age-level than later. Picture-books have so much to draw on, and not even the need for a story: they have an audience still visually un: conventional enough to take essays in fantasy without blinking, and all the resources of typo- graphy and presentation, images, colour, fun. Text and pictures together are what count, not separately; and they must go together as colours should—to set each other off.. not 'match.' A brilliant picture and word book is Ounce. Dice. Trice, with text by Alastair Reid and drawings of exactly the right tough quality by Ben Yiiihn, so that what might .sinend whimsical is anything but that when you look at it beside the beautiful and/or deflating pictures. Words are ii,cd for their texture and mood, lightly but accurately, with respect and amusement: there are lists of light words, heavy words, squishy words for wet weather, names, oddities, jokes, lost-and-revived words, personal words and ways of counting sheep if you get bored with the usual ones: such as 'ounce dice trice quartz sago ser- pent oxygen nitrogen denim.' No one, in text or blurb, suggests this is a child's book: the best have often happened that way.
LSAEILL QUIGLY
Previous page
