I start with a caveat. Not all of these books came out this year. But since I read them in 2015, I’m going to put them on my list (and you’re going to excuse me for this sophistry).
We read a lot of picture books in the household because of the resident four-year-old. It’s been a learning (and humbling) experience for me to discover that she isn’t always enthusiastic about the ‘great’ picture books that I thrust upon her and is sometimes besotted with some utterly inane and mass-produced junk that pains my soul. Ah well, it’s probably the bad karma I earned in my adolescent years when I walked around with bright blue nail polish.
The good news, however, is that once in a while, we do agree. These are the top three picture books this year.
Lili by Wen Dee Tan (2015)
I met Wen Dee when I went to Sharjah for the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival earlier this year. I fell in love with this book immediately. It’s about a girl whose hair is on fire! While the images are all in black and white, Lili’s hair alone is a bright orange… nobody wants to be friends with her because she sets things on fire by accident (though she proves to be useful to her parents by letting them cook on her head). This strange and funny story is about the pain of not fitting in, loneliness, and finally, finding acceptance on your own terms.
Flutterfly by Niveditha Subramaniam (2015) Niveditha and I have worked on many books together, and I’ve known her for over a decade. But that’s not why this book is here. This is a wordless picture book that has a colourful flutterfly ( not butterfly) flitting through the pages and taking you through ordinary, mundane scenes from everyday life, making the familiar appear fantastic. Like Lili , the images are in black and white, but for the flutterfly itself. My daughter enjoys tracing the flutterfly as it flies from my one page to another and making up her own narrative about what’s happening. At first, she was confounded that there were no words at all, but later, she began to enjoy the book for this very reason.
Elephantantrum by Gillian Shields (2013) This is about a girl, Ellie, who has everything in the world. But she wants an elephant. And she won’t eat or sleep or do anything till her father gets her one. Her indulgent daddy manages to get her an elephant by post (yes, really) but Ellie soon discovers that the elephant isn’t quite what she expected. A hilarious story with imaginative illustrations, it’s a perfect read-together book for parent and child, who will both completely relate to what’s going on.
I also enjoyed reading the following books that are for older children:
Talking of Muskaan by Himanjali Sankar (2014) A sensitively-written novel that deals with adolescence, sexuality and peer pressure. I was happy, most of all, to discover a YA book that got the voice right… there are too many YA reads with jarring speak-kewl language strewn across the narrative to make the characters appear ‘real’. The book bravely deals with difficult issues without offering simplistic solutions — and not all authors have the humility to let their readers think for themselves.
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean (2014) This is an anthology of feminist, collaborative fiction; a partnership between writers and illustrators from India and Australia. I didn’t like all the stories in the book equally, but some of the narratives are truly arresting.
Given that in a patriarchal society women are the eternal victims, it’s liberating to read speculative fiction where it’s possible to dream bigger and question the fundamentals we’ve always taken for granted.
