Sometimes, children’s books are not valued as they deserve, as if producing a work of literary quality intended for the youngest readers did not require equally arduous work. As if there were less art in them. To refute this, we present three books for children that deserve to be approached with the same seriousness as a novel by Murakami or Paul Auster.
Is about Meanwhile on Earth (Fund of Economic Culture), Peque and Lolo (Pípala) and The day the Earth and the Moon fought (Lemon Tree). Each one proposes a journey, which may be nothing more than stages within a single great itinerary through different aspects of human nature.
Travel in books
The title of The day the Earth and the Moon fought He is eloquent. Written by the Irishman David Duff and illustrated by the Italian Noemí Viola, the book imagines that after an argument the silver satellite decides to separate from its eternal companion after 4.5 billion years. In search of warmer destinations, he sets off towards the sun and along the way he meets Venus and Mercury. However, for one reason or another she doesn’t feel comfortable with any of them.
The same thing happens when it heads towards the opposite side of the solar system and crosses the rest of the planets until it reaches distant Pluto. The journey allows Moon to revalue her bond and spend time with her lifelong friend again. The drawings in the book, colored with a marker, refer to those that the children make in their school notebooks. The last two pages compile a series of data that provide readers with some knowledge about astronomy, physics and chemistry, balancing the poetic and the didactic.
The same itinerary is the one proposed Meanwhile on Earth, by Northern Irishman Oliver Jeffers. Only here those who travel the solar system are a father and his two children aboard the family car. A trip that was not planned, but when the father sees the two boys fighting in the back seat he decides to embark on an educational outing. As the journey is made at a car speed of 60 km/h, completing it takes thousands of years. Time that the adult takes to go back in history and recount the different conflicts that humans have had since their origin.
“We always think that the Earth is so big that it is better to divide it into smaller parts. It seems that humans always fight over territory,” the father explains to his children. The Second World War coincides with the arrival at Venus, the trip to Mercury with the European exploitation of Africa and the passage through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with the Spanish arrival in America. And so on until the Ice Age on Pluto. Cleverly and based on his beautiful illustrations, Jeffers combines astronomy with history to create a philosophical, almost Hobbesian, approach to human beings.
Of the three books, Peque and Lolo It is the one that proposes the apparently most innocent, most naive story, but also the most profound and poetic. Written and illustrated by the British Roisin Swales, it portrays the friendship between a squirrel and a turtle who feel insurmountable. They do everything together: they climb, they eat, they play, they run. Until one day something changes: Lolo, the turtle, no longer wants to do anything and disappears into his shell. And despite Peque’s efforts, there is nothing that will convince her to get out of it again. Until a hug breaks the “spell.”
From the author’s dedication to her grandmother (“We were a great team,” she says), it is possible to think that it is not only a story about the value of friendship, but about loss, even about grief. Even so, there is no melancholic or dark look in its development. On the contrary, Peque and Lolo It clings with moving tenderness to the value of affection contained in a hug that sometimes, as the dedication itself expresses in the past tense, can only be given through memory.
