Rethinking Our Atlas of Possibility: An Alphabet Book of Imaginative, Uncommon, and Stereotype-Defying Occupations

An antidote to centuries of limiting and unimaginative ideas about what boys and girls can grow up to be.

As a lover of unusual alphabet books and of intelligent, imaginative children’s books that defy gender stereotypes, celebrate diversity, and counter bigotry, I was instantly taken with Work: An Occupational ABC (public library) by Toronto-based illustrator and designer Kellen Hatanaka — a compendium of imaginative, uncommon, stereotype-defying answers to the essential what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up question.

With a sensibility between mid-century children’s books and Blexbolex, Hatanaka weaves bold graphics and soft shades into a tapestry of tender vignettes about people of all shapes, sizes, and colors. There is the K-9 officer (female) training her trusty dog on an obstacle course; the Butcher (heavy-set) chasing after a mischievous raccoon that got away with the sausage; the Naval Architect (female) oversees the construction of a large ship near the shore as the Oceanographer (female, dark-skinned) explores the marine world below the surface.

What emerges is an atlas of vocational possibility that offers a heartening antidote to our culture’s stale menu of options for what constitutes a successful life; a toolkit that fortifies young readers against the malady anguishing so many modern grownups — the challenge of letting our life speak and defining our own success.

Hatanaka’s depiction of women is especially emboldening — they aren’t pinkwashed stick-figures and don’t shy away from brawny or brainy pursuits.

Complement the immeasurably wonderful Work, which comes from Canadian independent children’s-book publisher Groundwood Books, with Maira Kalman’s design-history alphabet book, which was among the best children’s books of 2014, and Oliver Jeffers’s illustrated stories for the letters.

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Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress: A Tender Story of Gender Identity, Acceptance, and Overcoming Bullying

How to swish, swish, swish one’s way into the spaceship of identity.

Of all the imprisoning polarities and stereotypes in our culture, none is more pervasive than the imprisoning gender expectations we instill in kids from an early age. Even young Mark Twain took issue with them in his irreverent 1865 gem Advice to Little Girls, and a New Yorker cartoonist satirized them brilliantly a century later. Today, the situation is improving only slowly, only modestly, thanks to the occasional children’s book encouraging young girls to transcend our gendered vocational stereotypes. But what about little boys who don’t relate to society’s prescription for how they should inhabit their own identity and don’t understand why they aren’t allowed to enjoy what little girls enjoy? As Erika Trafton wrote in her moving meditation on gender identity, “This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball, trucks, and trains. This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous.” And yet Andrew Solomon put it best in his superb book on parents, children, and the search for identity: “Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.”

That exercise is what writer and anti-bullying champion Christine Baldacchino and illustrator Isabelle Malenfant explore with great warmth and tenderness in Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (public library) — another belated but wholly worthy addition to the year’s best children’s books, which tells the story of a sweet but misunderstood little boy derided and ostracized by his classmates because he loves wearing the tangerine dress in his classroom’s dress-up center.

Imaginative and wildly creative, little Morris likes to paint and sing and do puzzles while humming to himself. He loves the tangerine dress because its color “reminds him of tigers, the sun and his mother’s hair”; he loves the sound it makes, too: “swish, swish, swish when he walks and crinkle, crinkle, crinkle when he sits down.”

When the boys make fun of him and the girls jeer at the pink nail polish on his fingers, he pretends not to notice them, but his heart aches with anguish.

His classmates even shun him from the spaceship they are building — “Astronauts don’t wear dresses,” they scoff.

One day, Morris is so crestfallen over the ceaseless bullying that he begins to feel physically ill. (Indeed, psychologists are now finding that “social pain” has biological repercussions.) He is sent home, where he dreams up a grand space adventure with his cat Moo.

The next day, Morris takes out his brushes and paints a wild, vibrant picture of his dream, complete with a shiny space helmet for Moo. In the drawing, Morris is wearing his beloved tangerine dress riding atop a big blue elephant.

On Monday, Morris went to school with his painting rolled up in his backpack.

When he had the chance, he put on the dress that reminded him of tigers and the sun and his mother’s hair.

Morris swish, swish, swished.
The tangerine dress crinkle, crinkle, crinkled.
His shoes click, click, clicked.
Morris felt wonderful.

The boys in his class are so enchanted by the space-world Morris dreamt up — a world into which he welcomes them — that they decide “it didn’t matter if astronauts wore dresses or not” because “the best astronauts were the ones who knew where all the good adventures were hiding.” With a quiet smile, Morris accepts their acceptance.

When snack time was over, Becky demanded the dress.
Morris told her she could have it when he was done with it.
“Boys don’t wear dresses,” Becky snipped.
Morris smiled as he swished, crinkled and clicked back to his spaceship.
“This boy does.”

Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress is immensely heartening from cover to cover. It comes from Canadian independent children’s-book powerhouse Groundwood Books, makers of such gems as Isabelle Arsenault’s Once Upon a Northern Night and Liniers’s What There Is Before There Is Anything There. Complement it with the rest of this year’s most wonderful children’s books, then revisit Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir of transgender parenting.

Illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books

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Once Upon a Northern Night: A Loving Illustrated Lullaby of Winter’s Whimsy

A song of innocence and seasonal experience.

“How can an old world be so innocent?” Annie Dillard wondered in her beautiful ode to winter. Carl Sagan believed that the reverence and awe we experience in our encounters with nature bring us the closest we get to divinity. Out of that ancient innocence and that divine reverence writer Jean E. Pendziwol and illustrator Isabelle Arsenault weave a beautiful lullaby in Once Upon a Northern Night (public library | IndieBound) — a loving homage to winter’s soft-coated whimsy, composed with touches of Thoreau’s deep reverence for nature and Whitman’s gift for exalting “the nature around and within us.”

Once upon a northern night
while you lay sleeping,
wrapped in a downy blanket,
I painted you a picture.

It started with one tiny flake,
perfect
and beautiful
and special,
just like you.
Then there were two,
and then three.

Soon
the night sky filled with
sparkling specks of white
crowding
and floating,
tumbling down to the welcoming ground
until the earth was
wrapped in a downy blanket,
just like you.

Arsenault — whose art graces such previous gems as Jane, the Fox & Me, a graphic novel inspired by Charlotte Brönte, and Virginia Wolf, a picture-book reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s childhood with her sister Vanessa, and Migrant, a kind of Alice in Wonderland for the modern immigrant experience — captures in befitting pictures the magical scenes Pendziwol paints with words: Pine trees “held prickly hands to catch the falling flakes”; a mother doe and her fawn “nuzzled the sleeping garden with memories of summer, then wandered off”; a “small, small mouse with big, big ears” scurries across the picnic table “mounded with snowy white like vanilla ice cream.”

Once upon a northern night
a great gray owl gazed down
with his great yellow eyes
on the milky-white bowl of your yard.
Without a sound
not even the quietest whisper,
his great silent wings lifted and
down,
down,
down,
he drifted,
leaving a feathery sketch
of his passing
in the snow.

Once upon a northern night,
deep,
deep
in the darkest hours,
the snowy clouds crept away
and stars appeared —
twinkling points of light
hanging in the purple sky.

I knew by the time you woke,
the sun would have chased them away,
so I set them like diamonds
on the branches of the willow.

Complement the immeasurably whimsical Once Upon a Northern Night with the vintage Scandinavian classic Moominland Midwinter, then revisit the best children’s books of the year.

Illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books

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What There Is Before There Is Anything There: Celebrated Cartoonist Liniers Confronts Childhood Nightmares

An imaginative graphic novel about the quintessential childhood fear.

Children often wonder about why we dream, as do some dedicated researchers, but the question of why we have nightmares is as perplexing to scientists — some of humanity’s most intelligent grownups — as it is exasperating to kids. Indeed, nightmares, along with its sister fear of the dark, are among childhood’s most anguishing and common experiences, as exasperating to the child experiencing them as to his or her parents in their helplessness of assuaging them.

That’s precisely what award-winning Argentinian cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist Liniers (whose beloved Macanudo series was just released in English for the first time) explores in What There Is Before There Is Anything There: A Scary Story (public library | IndieBound) — a wonderful picture-book that brings dark humor to those familiar nighttime fears while taking them seriously, at once spooky and sweet in its solidarity of acknowledging that they are very much real, even if their objects are not true. One of the great injustices of childhood, after all, is the recurring experience of not being believed by grownups, not being validated in one’s fears and fancies and subjective truths simply because one is a child. Liniers refuses to negate the realness of those childhood fears and instead meets them with equal parts reassurance, imagination, and gentle wit, in a style reminiscent of Edward Gorey yet distinctively his own.

What There Is Before There Is Anything There, a treat in its delightfully spooky yet assuring totality, is translated by Elisa Amado and comes from Canadian independent picture-book publisher Groundwood Books, who also gave us the enormously heartening Migrant, a kind of Alice in Wonderland for the modern immigrant experience. Complement it with a very different take on the same subject in Lemony Snicket’s The Dark, illustrated by Jon Klassen.

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