| rauniyar |
Posted
on 08-Apr-04 06:47 AM
Even as I plunged into the adult reading world at quite an early age, now I wish I too had access to some of the wildly imaginative stories my daughter enjoys. For her birthday recently she received HarperCollins’ Treasury of Picture Book Classics, a collection of picture books seeped in children’s worldview, instead of what adults think children’s worldview should be like, i.e., one that distrusts their innate intelligence and boasts a resounding moral. HarperCollins’ Treasury of Picture Book Classics starts with an epigraph respecting the child’s imaginative mind: “Most children … will react creatively to the best work of a truly creative person.”
The first story, “Goodnight Moon,” published in 1947, delights in language, building up great anticipation for the reader:
“In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of—
(turn the page)
The cow jumping over the moon.”
The rhyme scheme is wonderful—with both end-rhymes and internal rhymes. The story catalogues and illustrates what’s in the room, and the juxtaposition of the objects are unpredictable and pleasing: “a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush,” and on the next page, “And a quiet old lady whispering hush.”
Uhi Rajeev
CT, Amrika
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