As a nerdy father of two little precocious kids, I can’t wait to have the opportunity to pass on some of the things I love in life; the music that’s moved me, the movies that astound me, and most importantly, the books that have nurtured me. I have a gargantuan list of things that I want to put in front of my son and daughter, and I hope that some of them spark some interest, though I’m quickly becoming aware that most of it probably won’t. Both kids have pushed back when I’ve tried to show them episodes of Sesame Street or Yo Gabba Gabba, and instead are obsessed with the lowest rent, manipulative clap trap on youtube, the Dianas, Blippis, or Cocomelons of the world. I’ve tried introducing them to the Ramones, Gorillaz, They Might Be Giants, and The Flaming Lips and the results have been a mix of outright anger at my musical taste, or in the case of the Gorillaz, it hit too hard. My daughter has listened to Clint Eastwood so many times that I’m absolutely fine if I never hear the band again. It’s such a tricky thing, discovering how to share the stuff I love with these kids.
There are many things I’ve done in my life that I never thought I would do. Stuff that ranges from becoming the owner of a set of series one Garbage Pail Kids to being included in a documentary covering my all-time favorite film, The Monster Squad, and having it, in turn, be included on the release of said film as a special feature. I’ve outlived everyone in my childhood immediate family, been mentioned on NPR, and quit my job of almost 20 years to move across the country to live with my girlfriend and future wife. Of all of these outrageous things, the most shocking thing I never thought I would do was to become a father.
For the majority of my adult life, I was certain that children were not going to be in my future, but in 2018 my wife and I welcomed our first child, an adorable little girl who has changed who I am from the core out. As much as an earlier version of me would have denied a plan to reproduce, I’ve always been weirdly preparing to pass on some of my obsessions to a new generation. In particular, I was stockpiling a mini library of books that I felt were essential to a child learning to read and beginning their adventure exploring some of the most amazing stories ever put to paper. Beautifully illustrated editions of Pinocchio, Peter Pan, the Roald Dahl Library, and The Wizard of Oz joined library editions of Madeline, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and the complete Lang Library of Coloured Fairy books (which contain the Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Arabian Nights stories along with hundreds of others.) In preparation, after my wife and I discovered we were expecting, I went into hyperdrive acquiring a ton of other books, as well as listing a bunch on our baby shower registry. We assembled an entire shelf of Little Golden Books, classics like Where the Wild Things Are, The Monster at the End of This Book, Green Eggs and Ham, and a bunch of Berenstain Bears books. Reading, storytelling, and writing are all passions very close to my heart, so I felt like we were adequately prepared to start imbuing my daughter with that passion as well. And of course, I was wrong.
It’s not that there weren’t some hits in there. By the time she was three, very vocal in general, and asking to be read to each night, there were books that she absolutely loved and that I loved reading to her. The standouts were Where the Wild Things Are and The Monster at the End of This Book, both of which she’s asked me to read to her at least twenty or thirty times apiece. But the experience of reading to her has been weirdly fraught with so many weird left turns and disappointments. For instance, I remember absolutely loving my small but well-read hand-me-down Little Golden Books from my sister’s childhood library. I would pour over the illustrations and essentially taught myself to read with the various Looney Tunes and Disney adaptations. But upon digging into the hundred or so books I bought for my daughter in the series, almost all of them have been horrible. The adaptations in particular are horrendous, with the Disney books being the worst offenders. Granted, I know there is such a small page count to work with, but every book only ever adapts like one, maybe two scenes from the film. They’re never the main gist of the story and they’re always wonky and weird out of context of the rest of the film. I started to wonder if maybe each film had like five or six different titles that ended up more fully adapting the stories, but no. It’s just the scene in Mary Poppins when the kids end up floating to the ceiling in Uncle Albert’s house because of laughing. Modern adaptations of cartoons are even worse as so many of them are literally just a breakdown of the opening title credits sequence or theme song. Or they simply just list off characters in the films.
I was also crushed when the Library du Fae, the Andrew Lang Fairy books have versions of the Grimms and Andersen folktales that are so dryly written that no kids can sit through them. Similarly, the Shel Silversteen poetry in Where the Sidewalk Ends completely baffles my daughter. I adored them as a kid, but she hates it when I crack the cover of that book (which breaks my heart.) So, I started hitting up our local library for large format picture storybooks which I checked out 20 or 30 at a time to try and find styles and stories that engaged her. There were some successes here and there like One Chicken Nugget by Tadgh Bently, or Hip & Hop Don’t Stop by Jef Czekaj, both of which give room for me to either really animatedly read the text or in the case of Hip Hop, to put on my MC Dad rap hat. But we cycled through a lot of books and the hits are far and between.
I suppose this is par for the course and part of what becoming a reader is like, but as a parent trying to pass on a love for reading, it’s frustrating as hell. I also noticed that after about 60 or seventy of these picture books, my daughter would want to read two or three each night. That’s a good sign, but it’s also a sign that each story wasn’t really satisfying her. It was very clearly a matter of quantity not quality. So, by four and a half, I could clearly tell she was yearning for chapter books. But that presented another challenge as it’s also clear that she still really needs constant imagery to stick with the story. I broke out my copy of Bunnicula and it was a disaster. Without pictures on every page, she couldn’t keep up with the characters or actions of the story.
So I found myself alone in Barnes and Noble one day, browsing the kids section trying to find an answer to my dilemma. How can I get my daughter excited about reading, engaged for longer than a 40-page picture book, but not lost in the full-page blocks of text in your typical chapter books? Then I saw something that practically jumped off the shelf and into my hands. Jon Klassen’s The Skull. My daughter and I had actually dug into some of Klassen’s work already. His series of Hat books (I Want My Hat Back, This is Not My Hat, and We Found a Hat) were some of the fun picture books we’d checked out, though they were a little quirky for her taste. And the series of shapes books he illustrated for Mac Barnett were also some of the better picture books we’d found at our local library. But the Skull was a completely different animal.
Everything about this book intrigued me, from the morbid title to the style of illustration, and even the materials the book was printed on. The dust jacket on the book has a matte texture that almost feels like wax wrapper on a pack of trading cards, which is so nice from a tactile standpoint. The size is fun where it’s only slightly larger than the novel trade paperback format, but not nearly as large as a standard picture book. The work itself is just over a hundred pages, but it’s heavily illustrated throughout so that there is never a page turn without imagery. And the text itself varies between a few sentences to full pages of story, so overall it’s like reading two to three standard picture books all in one go. It’s the perfect format for my daughter in this phase she’s found herself in.
I haven’t even touched on the story itself, which is breathtaking in its deceptive simplicity. The plot is adapted from a Tyrolean folktale of the same name about a runaway named Otilla who finds refuge in a woodland mansion whose caretaker is a skull, the remnant of the previous owner who no longer remembers their past life fully. This is the setup for a beautiful tale of kindness, loyalty, trust, and friendship that is equal parts fragile and brutal. It’s hilarious at times, empowering at others, and has so many lessons to offer a growing mind. The tale is brought to life by the expressionistic artwork by the author/illustrator Klassen. He chose a very limited dark/cool color palette of black, white, and grey/green that is punctuated by swaths of pale orange and hints of red. The color itself is a highly choreographed dance between sadness and hope, which is a very subtle underline to the themes of the tale.
I’ve read this book to my daughter several times and have revisited it at least ten times myself since I picked it up last October. I cannot recommend this volume enough. My only gripe about this book is its existence, because I have yet to find any similar stories (format-wise) and I’d buy an entire shelf of these in a heartbeat.
