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- Contents Category: Children's and Young Adult Fiction
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- Article Title: Margaret Dunkle reviews four books
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Swans are said to mate for life and The Stone Swan builds on the love and anguish of such a relationship as the focus for a lesson in environmental responsibility. A pair of swans, lagging behind the rest of their flight, take solitary refuge in a wetland adjacent to a new housing estate, unaware that it is targeted for ‘development’. The cygnets hatch as the water levels subside and the male swan becomes trapped in a tangle of exposed rubbish and plastic twine. He is near death from exhaustion when a child from the nearby estate finds and frees him. But the peril is not over, for a causeway is being built across the wetland, isolating the swan family from the rest of the flock. The male manages to climb to the top of the roadway, but he will not go on without his mate and she will not leave without her babies. The story ends as she and her young, now fully fledged, fly off to join the flock on their annual migration while the human child witnesses her last farewell to the swan-shaped stone that has appeared on the causeway. Bell’s sombre illustrations in ink and watercolour reinforce the tragic mood of the story. A final page provides background information and references for this timely picture book that could be used effectively in primary school ecology studies.
Keep Me Company by Gillian Rubinstein, illustrated by Lorraine Hannay
Puffin, $11.95 pb
Family love, loyalty, faithfulness are also a feature of Keep Me Company (Puffin, $11.95 pb), in which a small child makes the most of her light case of chicken pox and her heroically patient mum panders lovingly to her every whim. Mum, smile never slipping, gets on with the housework while Marnie ‘keeps her company’ in the bathroom, laundry, on the telephone … Rubinstein states in her afterword ‘little children can be tiring, but the memories of the many ways my children kept me company are really precious to me now’. Hannay illustrates from photographs and the result is often a frozen realism. Her beautiful child model seems unflawed by any poxy rash although she sports a very red, protruding navel. This is the first paperback reprint of a hardback original from 1992.
The Adventures of Charlotte and Henry by Bob Graham
ABC Books, $22.95 hb
Charlotte and Henry (ABC Books, $22.95 hb) may also, in a sense, be counted as a reprint, since these stories have been featured since 1984 in Belles Histoires, a monthly French children’s magazine. They celebrate the kind of bonding that sometimes grows between two children who have been friends from early childhood, friends who are often closer than siblings, who are as comfortable with each other, as tolerant and caring, as two individuals may be. Charlotte is impulsive, dramatic, and lives with her warmly freewheeling mum. Henry, cautious and responsible, has both parents plus the kind of large, shaggy dog that always appears in Graham’s picture books. The situations in the nine brief stories are universal but the setting indefinably but distinctively French, a unique achievement, I think, for a much-loved Australian now living in England. Graham’s short, plain, kindly, ordinary people translate very well into a universal ambience and his passionate love for every mongrel dog is right at home. Large cheerful pen and watercolour sketches with a brief, amusing text beneath make these just right for beginning readers in English, and I expect the original French text would be equally inviting. Why not a bilingual edition?
Fox by Margaret Wild, illustrated by Ron Brooks
Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb
If the love and trust implicit in Charlotte and Henry are germane to the story, trust and love are the essence of Fox (Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb). In a time of heat and bushfire, Dog, homeless and wild in the bush, befriends Magpie with her charred, maimed wing. Dog is also handicapped, with one blind eye, and they form a loving partnership: ‘I will be your missing eye, and you will be my wings.’ They live together contentedly, enjoying each other’s company, until one day Fox ‘flickers through the trees like a tongue of flame’. Dog welcomes him but Magpie is afraid, aware that ‘his smell seems to fill the cave – a smell of rage and envy and loneliness.’ He lures Magpie away, then abandons her in the scorching desert: ‘Now you and Dog will know what it is like to be truly alone.’ It will be a long way back.
Brooks has used a rich variety of media and a scratchy, hand-lettered text to interpret Wild’s moving, Aesopian parable about love and envy, evil and faithfulness. Together this gifted team of author/artist are creating a memorable collection of picture books that, I think, are changing the whole direction of this genre within the Australian publishing scene. Of all Wild’s illustrators, Brooks seems best to interpret her texts. Their Old Pig ranks, for me, in the same class as John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, the book that Brooks and Jenny Wagner produced in 1977 and which also marked a turning point in our picture book history.
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