From Tasha Tudor to Paw Patrol: Picture books should be complex, beautiful, perhaps 'weird'

"Children's books have gotten uglier," writes Alexa Weathers. Older picture books feature illustrations with "depth, texture, attention to nature, and an individual artistic style," she writes. "Today, many of the mass-market illustrations are flatter, louder, and more like clip-art."

She compares a spread from Brambly Hedge beside one from the best-seller How to Catch a Unicorn. Both books "are colorful, whimsical, and intended to delight children," Weathers writes. "But they ask completely different things of the child’s attention."

In Brambly Hedge, the "rooms are filled with tiny jars, baskets, linens, furniture, food, and a little world" that gives a child "something new to discover" with every reading, she writes. By contrast, "the unicorn spread is crowded with a rainbow, glitter, giant lettering, exaggerated expressions, speech bubbles, and a joke about farting glitter. Nearly every element competes at the same intensity."

Children's books should reward close attention and patience, she writes. "So much of what surrounds children now is already loud, cheaply produced, and overstimulating: plastic toys in garish colors, clothing covered in characters and slogans, and television designed to hold their attention every second," Weathers writes. "Their books do not need to add to that noise. They can be one of the few places where a child is invited to slow down and really look."

Picture books should be great art, children's author Mac Barnett tells Greg Toppo. The author of more than 70 books, Barnett published Make Believe, a best-selling book of essays about writing for children. 

Barnett most often sees books that simultaneously do too much and too little: books that seek to instruct and impose morals and manners on children, while others aren’t quite rich and strange enough for the “flexible, unpredictable, sublime, and untamable” imaginations of young people. 

Barnett has a fascinating analysis of the "weirdness" of Goodnight Moon. The author sent the illustrator a picture of a Goya painting and told him "this is what the book should feel like."

He annoyed fellow authors, writes Toppo, by suggesting that 94.7 percent of kids' books are "crud," a variation of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s observation that 90% of sci-fi writing is crud.” That's because they’re made by people “who are not members of their intended audience.”

Barnett later apologized. His point "was to say that it was harder to write and succeed at a book for kids than almost any other kind of art-making that we do." A writers needs to "make something for kids that is authentic and relevant and recognizable to them as a truth about the world. It’s a really hard thing that we have to do, and it’s worth doing. But oh man, is it so hard."

He concludes: "The picture book is one of the great literary forms, and it’s a unique literary form that belongs next to the novel, the short story, poetry, plays as one of the great ways that humans have come up with to tell stories, to share ideas, to capture feeling, to preserve histories, to explore the natural world, the interior world."