Four new picture books tackle the subject in sensitive, reassuring ways.
Children’s books — particularly picture books — that tackle the subject of war in sensitive and reassuring ways are rare. Figuring out how to explain such morbid business to children presents a serious challenge for authors and illustrators. If they truthfully depict death and destruction, they risk increasing children’s fears. If they offer false and improbable scenarios, they risk children’s mistrust.
I have been trying to crack this problem for years, but ever since my former homeland unleashed its war against Ukraine on Feb. 24, finding a solution has become urgent.
My family originated in Ukraine. Watching Russian rockets destroy their hometown, Dnipro, stirs anxiety in me not unlike what children who are far away from Ukraine must feel when they come upon ghastly media images that make the war appear dangerously close.
The encouraging news is that a growing number of publishers are finding effective ways to address this subject without diminishing its gravity.
In NOOR AND BOBBY (Yonder/Restless Books, 40 pp., $18.95, Ages 4 to 7) — written by the French-Lebanese storyteller Praline Gay-Para, illustrated in papercut collage by Lauranne Quentric and translated from the French by Alyson Waters — a boy runs after a dog abandoned by its owner in a city ravaged by war. The location of the city and the circumstances of the dog’s abandonment are never explained, but a sensitive reader will pick up clues that a catastrophe of some kind has taken place. The gap between what proves to be a fairly straightforward narrative and the mysterious world in which it unfolds will lead, one hopes, to honest yet comforting conversations between children and adults.
In SITTI’S BIRD: A Gaza Story (Crocodile Books, 32 pp., $18.95, Ages 4 to 7) the Palestinian painter Malak Mattar creates a slice-of-life narrative that explores how painting helped her overcome the fear and isolation she experienced during Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2014. The tension between Mattar’s naïve, fanciful paintings and her naturalistic, moment-by-moment storytelling underscores the value of creativity during times of crisis.
Kitty O’Meara’s THE RARE, TINY FLOWER (Tra Publishing, 40 pp., $18.99, Ages 4 to 8), illustrated by Quim Torres, relies on metaphor to introduce children to the often trivial reasons for war. When a rainbow-colored bird drops a seed, the seed germinates and grows into a rainbow-colored flower. World leaders gather to view the vibrant flower, but owing to the limitations of their points of view each sees only one color in the bloom. Heated arguments about the color of the flower escalate to a full threat of war, until a young girl comes along and demonstrates to the leaders that each is right and wrong at the same time.
Chana Stiefel’s THE TOWER OF LIFE: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs (Scholastic, 40 pp., $18.99, Ages 6 to 8), illustrated by Susan Gal, is more explicit in its depiction of war. A Holocaust survivor, Eliach brought back to life the Polish shtetl in which she grew up by collecting photographs of its residents, which were later assembled into an art installation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This masterfully illustrated biography argues that even the Nazis, though they may have been able to physically erase a shtetl, were powerless to destroy deep human connections to family and home.
I wish the need for depicting wars in children’s books was well behind us, but in our precarious world children must cope with complex feelings caused by disturbing news. It is encouraging to know that picture books are on their way to help.
Eugene Yelchin is a Russian American author and illustrator of many books for children, most recently “The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain.”
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Books That Teach Children About War Without Frightening Them - The New York Times
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