What I am reading to my kids, part 2

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
by Bill Martin, Jr.
Illustrations by Eric Carle

I have a great deal of fondness for Bill Martin's books. He didn't write many of them, and many parents probably find them repetitive and simplistic, even for toddler books. I find them deceptively simple. Each page is a repetition of the same two sentences, a question and then the answer, each involved a different animal in succession: "Brown bear, brown bear, what do yo see? I see a red bird looking at me." Then, "Red bird, red bird, what do you see? I see a..." and so on.

What makes it so deceptive, or to use a better word, mysterious, is that you don't really know what you're seeing at first as you read the book. The animals seem to be inhabiting different spaces, but then by the end they seem to be inhabiting the same space and are all connected by in a mysterious way that's revealed at the end. This sense is heightened by Carle's illustrations, the visual sibling to Martin's writing - simple, flat, unnaturally colorful, and always with a white background that places the animal that's being shown in a ethereal space. In some ways, Brown Bear is a toddler version of a mystery novel, because at it's most elemental, an adult version is discovering how all of the characters in the book fit together. That is probably what draws kids to it, and why it has done so for so many years.

The book was Martin's first, published in 1960, and he wrote it at the age of 44 after a career as an educator in Texas. The book was also Carle's first, asked to illustrate it by Martin after his career as a magazine artist.

What's the big mystery? As you get to the middle of the book, with the blue horse and the purple cat, you realize that these aren't real animals, and by the end it's revealed that they are children's drawings gathered together in a classroom. The educational part, beyond the teaching of language through repetition, is that the simple story grounded in the real world. There are many kids picture books these days that are without any sense of meaning that is significant to kids. They fall into two camps. The first are superficial stories, i.e. the bunny did this and the bunny did that without any sense of narrative. Others books of labelling stock photographs that are the equivalent of disjointed imagery of television, just naming and identifying without any emotional investment into what the pictures are really depicting. Brown Bear requires kids to think and put together the animals significance, rather than just having them there as a pretty picture.

My son is only one year old, and can't grasp this at this point, but it is one of his favorite books. Someday he will grasp the Brown Bear mystery, and I hope it will continue to be one of his favorite books until he outgrows it. For now, he likes to look at those mysterious pictures of blue horses and purple cats. My daughter loved the book as well, and at the end of the book, where all the animals are together on the same page, we would play a game of find and point to each animal.

The only problem is that we have the board book version, and for some reason the publisher saw fit to change the ending. The teacher at the end of the original version was definitely a man, but in the board book version, they turned him into a hermaphrodite. Or a cross-dresser, I can't tell which. The publisher thought it would be less controversial to not have the teacher fit a gender role is my guess. Why do we feel the need to not offend anyone - in a children's book, for Christ's sake! Who cares if the teacher isn't strictly defined as a man, just in case the child's actual teacher is a woman and so the kid won't get confused? If you don't want to cause controversy, stick with the stock photo books.