Once Upon A Time...

When We Were Animals by Suzanne M. Schweikert M.D. Copyright 2004 Suzanne M. Schweikert All Rights Reserved In this column, Dr. Suzanne Schweikert explores the impact of having read too many good books when a kid. Comments, thoughts, and personal experiences on kid lit and related topics are welcome. Email: Dr.Schweikert@WritersMonthly.com

Once Upon A Time… When We Were Animals...

I’ve been resisting writing this column. I really didn’t want to write it. That’s because it’s about children’s Picture Books. And, while many of you have generously suggested your all-time favorite picture books, the truth is, I just didn’t want to write about them.

My reluctance was not because I don’t like cute drawings and blinding color palettes, but rather, I’ve just never thought there was all that much to a picture book. You can usually read them in less than ten minutes (even faster if the kid you are reading to likes to turn the pages while you are still talking). And in my mindset of high-brow fiction, I figured there would be more to say about the illustrations than the writing.

Despite my obvious narrow-mindedness, I decided to spend a few hours in the picture book section of my local bookstore. It took me a while, but eventually, an insight struck me, and when it did, it struck me hard. This insight was neither profound nor deep. In fact, it will probably come as no surprise to most of you, and you will consider me deluded for not having noticed it earlier. But I’ll share it with you anyway: The main characters of almost all picture books are animals.

What a contrast, I thought, to our "grown-up" books, which boast very few animal main characters (Watership Down and Sneaky Pie Brown being the obvious exceptions). In fact, fiction seems to phase out animals as rapidly as we grow up, so that by the time we are teenagers (at our most animalistic selves), our books are all about people. Why do toddlers deal so well with something that the rest of us cannot, I wondered, as I skimmed row after row of bear stories, dog stories, mouse stories, and two entire books devoted entirely to fictional wombats.

Do children enjoy animals more than adults? Do they behave more like animals than adults? Probably not. The real reason, I believe, is that kids are more in touch with their animal nature than adults are. They sense that they are no better or worse than a typical cat or zebra. Kids usually don’t have to stretch their imaginations to accept that a wombat is playing hooky from school. Kids recognize the humanity in animals, and the animality in themselves, and make no more note of it than they do of the weather. Can you remember the last time you heard a four year old commenting on the weather?

So, if children accept their animal nature, and do not need to differentiate between "us and them," are they right? And do we adults need to remind ourselves of this?

To answer this, I looked for a picture book which would speak to me, despite its non-human context. After looking at stories about various elephants, polar bears, and wolfs, the picture book I finally settled on (and took home with me, it was so good) was about a baby bat. No kidding. Her name, and the name of the book, is Stellaluna, and it was written and illustrated by southern Californian, Janell Cannon.

This story had me entranced on the first few pages, in a way I had not expected. It was not simply the writing or the illustrations, but the way the author expressed the baby bat’s determination to survive, in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

In the first three pages, Stellaluna is separated from her mother — a standard picture book, and indeed life, occurrence. The struggle to get back home after getting lost is a common theme for both children’s and adult’s books. But Stellaluna does not merely try to get home. She tries to fit in to her surroundings.

When she loses her mother, she lands smack into a bird’s nest, and is raised alongside three baby birds, by a slightly nearsighted mother bird. One day, the momma bird comes home to find the baby bat and three baby birds all hanging upside down, and she cries, "Eeeek! Get back up here this instant! You’re going to fall and break your necks!" It is one of those real life scenarios, when we find ourselves being told that what is instinctual to us (in Stellaluna’s case, hang upside down), is not acceptable to society.

Stellaluna reacts to this with a typically human fear of rejection, and she promises to never do this again. She represses her natural hanging-upside down instinct, an endeavor which would take up an entire middle section of a novel.

But can such a book speak to an adult who has also lost their way? After reading it from cover to cover, and laughing hysterically at the drawings, I would have to say that it can. Stellaluna’s is a coming of age story, about getting lost, conformity, and the struggle to find one’s identity and a new place in the world. In its 42 pages, it elicits emotions that an adult novel often requires 300 pages to convey.

In the end, children’s picture books give us an unmistakable awareness that, for animals and humans, our similarities are greater than our differences.

You don’t believe me? Well, think for a moment of those wildlife shows (remember Animal Kingdom) where thousands of Wildebeest cross the Masai Mara Reserve into the Serengeti Plains. The narrator reminds us that they are simply playing a numbers game. If you are a Wildebeest, you know that lions and hyenas will eat some of your kind every year. But you go anyway. When you are surrounded by a million other Wildebeests, it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s not going to be you.

This strikes me as similar to the way we get in our cars every day, playing our own numbers game. We assume that a careless driver won’t kill us today, and yet we know that someone dies every single day in a car. We undertake our own great migrations, to and from our jobs, the store, our kids’ schools. And, like the Wildebeests, most of the time we arrive safely.

So, it has occurred to me that more adult novels should have animals as main characters, to remind us of our similarities to other creatures on our planet. But until that happens, I will continue to peruse the picture book section, to find reminders of my animal self. And personally, I can’t wait for someone to write the very first Wildebeest book.

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