Image: Pixabay.

BooksJune 6, 2019

Please, no more poos: the best children’s picture books of 2019

Contributing writer

Image: Pixabay.

“Successful parenting is about ignoring the bad stuff and focusing unrelentingly on the good,” writes Catherine Woulfe – so let us rejoice in the line-up for best picture book at the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

There are so many shit books out there for little kids. Books where the rhymes swing and miss, where the story is devoid of both heart and reason or the illustrations are pretty much stills from a TV show. My most-hated trope is where they just drop the word “poo” or “bum” into the text, or make the story about farts. Also I’d like to burn all books based on Paw Patrol.

But successful parenting, allegedly, is about ignoring the bad stuff and focusing unrelentingly on the good – on what you’d like to see more of. Let us rejoice, then, in the line-up for best picture book at the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

There’s a zing about these five books, a verve, a colourful, fizzing intelligence. They treat their readers – children – like the complex little weirdos they are, and they know that reading to kids should not be a linear experience: there are oodles of question-sparkers and interest-grabbers on every page. The best of these books will grow with a child, too – at four, a child might get a kick out of the bright, splashy spreads in The Bomb; at six they might be interested in the calculations scribbled into the splashes, or start chipping in with their own ideas on exactly how one should hit the water to land the best bomb.

I’ve read all of these to my son many, many times. He is adamant: Puffin the Architect should win. This is mostly because he has a thing for puffins, possibly due to early and repeated exposure to Netflix’s finest, Puffin Rock. But he also thinks the Cars books are solid gold, so. Ignore him. Here’s my take on the top five.

Mini Whinny: Happy Birthday to Me, Stacy Gregg, illustrated by Ruth Paul (Scholastic NZ)

Um, this is a book about a miniature horse and a birthday party, so huge double advantage straight out of the blocks. But I don’t see how this miniature version of Stacy Gregg’s celebrated horse-oriented books – she’s won the Children’s Choice Junior Fiction Award three years running – could possibly beat the other books on the list.

Mini Whinny is the only miniature horse at Blackthorn Stables, which is otherwise inhabited by draught horses, showjumpers, a pretty palomino, and Berenice the moggie. When August 1 rolls around – the standardised birthday for all horses – Mini Whinny gets in a fluffy-maned huff about not getting a birthday all to herself.

In a scene that horrified my obsessed-with-the-rules child, Whinny stays up late then sneakily nicks all the party stuff and stashes it in her own stable.

“Happy birthday to me… Happy birthday to me… Mini Whinny had never noticed before how small and lonely her voice could be.”

There’s a real, gently-done sadness to this spread, before Whinny comes up with a fix. Much frolicking ensues.

Throughout, the cadence and rhyme all trit-trot off the tongue. The illustrations are… not gloriously original or recognisably New Zealand, but neither are they trying to be. Soft and sweet, they pair well with the story.

Puffin the Architect, Kimberly Andrews (Penguin Random House)

A puffin architect wants to design a new home for herself and her two picky pufflings. So she takes them on a tour of all the marvellous houses she’s designed, explaining and sketching clever features along the way.

Platypus the baker lives in a tricked-out riverside burrow with excellent storage solutions for all his yeast and flour. Otter the fisherman has the great storage, plus “furniture that folds away/ check out these fancy brackets”. The designs get objectively more awesome and kid-oriented with every house visit: a pulley-operated bed, secret tunnel systems, treehouses, flying foxes…

“Nope,” say the pufflings, with perfectly-pitched disdain. “Nuh-uh.”

Mummy puffin has rightfully had enough at this point but her little dears remind her that they’re puffins, not giraffes or pigs or platypuses. Can’t she design them a puffin cottage by the sea?

Can she what.

The story is terrific and the language bang-on, but really it’s the illustrations that put this book firmly in my top two. Each house is beautifully drawn in cross-section, so kids can see each design element working, and explore for themselves all the fascinating corners and quirks that aren’t discussed in the text. Each house also makes architectural sense – at least to my sixth form graphics-trained eye – and many extend underground with cellars or tunnel systems, which is a cool way of showing children a whole new perspective.

There’s enough detail here that you can spend 20 minutes on each page, easy. And more than that: you’ll actually want to.

Things in the Sea are Touching Me, Linda Jane Keegan, illustrated by Minky Stapleton (Scholastic NZ)

As previously stated the Spinoff Review of Books is officially besotted with this one – but now it’s sitting on our desk next to The Bomb and Puffin the Architect we have to face hard truths: it could and maybe should dip out.

Regardless! We will keep buying it for every small child we know because it is all kinds of wonderful.

The set-up is simple. During a family day at the beach, a little girl freaks out when things brush up against her in the water. She imagines these things – and Minky Stapleton’s drawn them perfectly – as creepy monster-hands, reaching for her from the deep. Don’t worry, says Ma. Just a wee crab/seaweed/mangrove pod/salp. Phew. We swim out a bit deeper, through changing shades of blue, and onto the next fright.

It’s the kind of book that leads to questions you’ll actually want to answer: what is a salp? Do sea urchins have mouths, though, Mummy? What does “kilter” mean?

For some kids Things in the Sea might also introduce an important new concept. The family, matter-of-factly, has two mummies – well, a Ma and a Mum. It’s apparently the first picture book published in New Zealand to feature non-hetero parents. Surely not, I thought. In 2018? Nahhhh…

But then we asked dozens of people who should know – Little Unity, The Sapling, librarians, kindy teachers, three lots of two mummies – and none of them could think of a predecessor. Can you?

The Bomb, Sacha Cotter, illustrated by Josh Morgan (Huia Publishers)

Layer upon layer of goodness and wonder. Take the inside cover, for example: it’s a child’s scrapbook of treasures, but to an adult’s eye speaks also to the importance of tipuna and links with the land. There are flattened daisies – those tiny ones with the pink tips, that grow in lawns – a feather, a kōwhai flower that a child with a red felt pen has transformed into a mermaid’s dress.

Taped in, too, are old black-and-white snapshots of an elegant, fabulous young woman, and more recent, colour shots of that elegant, fabulous woman, now a Nan, doting on her grandchild. They’re making daisy chains. They’re at the beach. They’re absorbed in each other. They are, of course, the heart of this story, which is ostensibly about the child learning to pull off the perfect manu.

The drawings are intricate: a jetty is wonderfully higgledy-piggledy, perspective is played with, there are physics equations scribbled inside splashes. And listen to the words! Read silently they bop about pleasingly; out loud they’re a delight: “I’m always dreaming of pulling off that perfect bomb. A booming one, a slapping one, a splashing, dripping, soaking one!”

The skins in this book are brown. The landscapes are an if-only green and they teem with tūī and pōhutukawa, kererū and harakeke. It’s Aotearoa as Eden. Lush, gorgeous, laid-back, populated by happy people in baggy boardies dropping sweet bombs.

I think The Bomb should win this category, and I really think it will. Actually, I think it has a shot at the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year.

Who Stole the Rainbow? Vasanti Unka (Penguin Random House)

Thwack! That’s the hot pink hitting you straight in the eyeballs. It’s the first thing you notice: neon is dashed and spackled across every page, most obviously on the big floppy ears and big sniffy nose of the beagle charged with tracking down a missing rainbow.

Our very serious pink detective traipses across a landscape of saturated green grass and indigo skies, interviewing key suspects: the cloud, the wind, the rain. Small, understatedly charming moments abound. On one page, the only text is: “He searched the crime scene.” Picture: the beagle lying on his back in a field, staring at the sky.

I’m a sucker for recognisable flora in children’s books – a well-placed dandelion can be a stepping-stone for a child between their own back lawn and the world of the story – and here there are neon nasturtiums and buttercups poking up all over. Weather is evocatively drawn. Wind is all fine whorls of hair; rain, a weeping watercolour. There’s a spectacular fold-out spread where the rainbow is rediscovered.

The story is simple and told straight – no place here for bouncy rhymes, but neither are there jarring notes. A factual section at the end sets out how rainbows really happen, explaining refraction and reflection with words and clear diagrams.

It is, most of all, quite stunningly beautiful. But to me Who Stole the Rainbow lacks the complexity, the depth, the magical delicious something – I want to say ‘umami’? – of The Bomb and Puffin the Architect. I’d be surprised if it took out the category.

Keep going!

BooksJune 5, 2019

Mark Manson’s Everything is F*cked: a first-person review

Mark Broatch

Guest writer

Mark Manson has followed up his mega-selling The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck with another sweary self-helper. Mark Broatch tries to get into his head.

Hi there. You might remember me from my previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. In that book, which I wrote when I was 32, I told you that everything you knew about self-improvement was wrong. You know, all that be healthier, be happier, be the best stuff. All wrong.

Don’t try, that was the answer, as the epitaph on Charles Bukowski’s tombstone said.

Don’t try didn’t mean don’t try, of course. Bukowski tried like hell for decades to be a writer, and jumped like a shickered sheep when he got the chance. It’s more that Bukowski knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. Even after he got famous, he still showed up to poetry readings pissed, exposed himself and hit on every woman in sight. He eventually sold about two million copies. As I say, self-improvement and success often occur together, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.

All that conventional life advice is actually fixating on what you lack. We are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time – buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. Buying more stuff may be good for business, but it’s bad for your mental health. We all have flat-screen TVs and our groceries delivered, but we are more depressed, more anxious and unhealthier than ever. The key to a good life is actually giving a fuck about less. Learning how to focus and prioritise what’s important and what’s not is perhaps the most worthy struggle one can undertake in one’s life. That’s the subtle bit.

That book sold six million copies, by the way.

Anyway, I’m baaaack! I’m now 35, and boy, I mean fuck, have I got some news for you. Everything is F*cked has the same artfully told tales about genuine heroes, repeat-for-emphasis arguments, fewer personal anecdotes (though, yes, before I got married I was popular with the ladies), a slightly more serious tone. Like The Subtle Art, there are deftly placed swears every few pages. And now with numbered endnotes, for those of you who wondered if I was just pulling those perfect philosophical epigrams out of my ass.

The subtitle of this book is “A Book About Hope”. By hope, as I write in a longer endnote, I don’t mean optimism or belief in the possibility of positive results like most academics, but purpose or meaning, drawing as I do on motivation and value theory research.

First, though, we have to figure out life’s purpose. To do that, we have to sort out what our Thinking Brain and our Feeling Brain are up to. See that self-control is an illusion. Get to grips with The Uncomfortable Truth and the Classic Assumption. Etc.

We’re the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world. Yet we suffer the paradox of progress: you remember, the better things get, the more we seem to despair. The wealthier and safer the place we live, the more likely we are to commit suicide. True.

If there are similarities with Jordan Peterson from time to time, I can’t help that. When you tell people that much of life is pain and striving, to stand up for your own principles and that Nietzsche was a pretty smart cat, perhaps that comparison is bound to be made. But look over here, I also have Kant, Schopenhauer and Plato. And Tom Waits.

The middle section of the book is about how to start your own religion. You know, belief systems, followers, rituals, scapegoats. Don’t worry, it all makes sense at the end. Though the actual end does take a bit of a turn you probably didn’t see coming. Though if you were reading carefully, you might have twigged that it’s all part of a larger argument, about algorithms and stuff.

Even though my books are shot through with interesting ideas about the wrongs in society, and genuine synthesised insights from my having read screeds of psychological research, I don’t offer any political or policy solutions. Politics is a transactional and selfish game, as I say, and democracy is the best system of government thus far for the sole reason that it’s the only one that openly admits it. It acknowledges that power attracts corrupt and childish people, and forces leaders to be transactional. The only way to manage this reality is to enshrine grown-up virtues into the design of the system. Things like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, guarantees of privacy and the right to a fair trial have to be baked into our social institutions. How do we do that?

Let me talk about political extremists. They are intractable and impossible to bargain with, and so, by definition, childish. A right-wing extremist will claim she desires “freedom” above all else, but really means that she wants freedom from having to deal with any values that do not map on to her own. Freedom from having to deal with change or the marginalisation of other people. A left-wing extremist will say he wants “equality” for all, but what he really means is he never wants anyone to feel pain, or harmed, or inferior. And he’s willing to cause pain and adversity to others to achieve that. Equality requires that everybody feel the same pain; freedom demands each person be forced to reckon with lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own.

In the developed world, we’re not suffering a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, of virtue, of means and ends. We’re childish and impulsive, or sometimes compromising adolescents, with too few real adults who do the right thing because it’s right; the maturity of our culture is deteriorating. Social media has made it so much worse.

So. Don’t pursue happiness. Living well doesn’t mean avoiding suffering: it means suffering for the right reasons. Get better at feeling bad. Don’t hope. Don’t despair either. Just be better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. Maybe meditate. Though actual Buddhist meditation is hard. You’re supposed to suck at it. Embrace the suckage. Have faith in something. Be an adult. Read the endnotes.

Everything is F*cked: A book about hope, by Mark Manson (Harper, $35) is available at Unity Books.