Picture books may not feed readers literary pabulum

                      Elizabeth MacCallum
                      National Post

                      Picture books aren't necessarily baby books or even easy books. Some
                      tell very mature stories. One of my children refused to listen to chapter
                      books long after she could comprehend them. For her, a book meant
                      pictures and that meant colour -- and not artsy black and white
                      woodcuts either. When she finally began to read on her own, it was
                      Disney fairy tales -- brown paper wrappers were on the way -- but
                      fortunately she soon moved on to Second World War novels. Thanks to her we learned about
                      artists such as Raymond Briggs and William Steig. Endowed with black humour and afraid of
                      nothing, not even war, they prove picture books have little to do with age. In Enough (Fitzhenry
                      & Whiteside, 32pp., $19.95), Canadian writer Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch has stayed with the
                      classic folk tale formula of a greedy landlord and his men who steal the harvest. This particular
                      landlord is Josef Stalin, though he is never named. After years of hunger, a little heroine named
                      Marusia finally masterminds a scheme to dig graves to hide the grain. News of such a large
                      graveyard reached the dictator who came to inspect the sacrifice. "Horrified, Marusia saw a scrap
                      of cloth, along with a few grains of wheat, sticking out of the last grave." Luckily, the dictator
                      assumed the peasants were too stupid to use coffins. Skrypuch never swerves from the folk tale
                      devices of her story. Despite her historical allusions, there is a magic stork which flies her to the
                      Canadian Prairies for crucial seed. And Michael Martchenko's spirited illustrations full of specific
                      detail right from the Ukrainian shawl lining the end-papers, give the story the weight of truth.
                      Beside the peasants' bright clothes and rich yellow fields of grain, a graveyard overwhelmed with
                      storm clouds shocks the reader into understanding what famine means. Sometimes Martchenko's
                      characters' cartoon-like mouths seem repetitive, almost lazy, but then his vision of the malicious
                      and nasty dictator and his indignant horse makes up for too many smiling peasants.