Eric Carle (1929–2021)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is simple, and joyful picture book that helps teach so much without feeling heavy or confusing. The story follows a small caterpillar who hatches, eats through more and more food each day, gets a stomachache, then later turns into a beautiful butterfly. Carle adds in counting, days of the week, the natural life cycle, and the idea of change and growth. The illustrations are vivid and bold which helps draw in children. The bright colors, and even holes in some show more pages that show where the caterpillar “ate through” make it fun and engaging for children. Kids can follow along, predict what comes next, count food, and watch as the caterpillar changes. Reading this as an adult, you see metaphors for patience and embracing change. This book has been a classic for many years, and continues to be! show less

A rooster spontaneously sets off to see the world, gathering recruits for the expedition while on the move, but runs up against the truism of the 7 Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. I rather enjoyed the awkward, crumbling comeuppance he is dealt.

A how-to-do-it-from-scratch book, but unlike Pelle's New Suit or Tomie de Paola's Charlie Needs A Cloak, this one stretches the bounds of credulity by forcing the poor hungry child Jack to harvest wheat, thresh wheat, visit the mill to have it ground, milk a cow, churn butter, fetch wood for fuel, and gather eggs ALL BEFORE BREAKFAST. At least he's allowed just to fetch strawberry jam from the basement instead of picking strawberries and refining sugar from beets. But rather than a realistic show more picture of how breakfast gets onto the table, it shows how ridiculous it would be to try to create a pancake from the rawest of raw materials every time you get hungry. The sun would be going down and Jack would have fainted from hunger long before his breakfast was done.

Our kids know about making pancakes, but they don't have to go to the henhouse before breakfast, let alone the flour mill. show less

Acclaimed children’s author and illustrator Eric Carle writes early in this book that he has received letters from kids asking if he’s written any “real” and “older” books—that is, nonfiction ones. He hadn’t, actually, and with this book he seeks to remedy that. Oddly, though, this sharply observed and rather quirky collection of vignettes, most of which feature animals, insects, and members of his family, isn’t really ideally suited to children at all, but to the adults show more who have shared Carle’s picture books with them. Let me explain. In one story, a pet cat is carried off by an owl; the cat meows piteously, but no one can save it, gripped as it is in the owl’s talons. In another story, a pet turtle, Flora, disappears when she’s due to be deposited in peat moss for her annual winter hibernation in the cellar. The following spring, grandfather’s shovel hits what the old man believes is a rock in the garden. It’s Flora—she’s frozen, and, sadly, no longer alive. These stories could be distressing to some young children. Adolescents might be better able to take the harder details in stride; Carle’s small gems, his luminous “moments of being”, might serve as writing models for students’ own short memoir pieces.

Carle—who was born in the US in 1929 to German immigrant parents, but who spent most of his childhood and youth in Germany (where his homesick parents returned)— obviously grew up in different, far more difficult times than many of us. For one thing, he experienced the Second World War first hand. In one story, he tells of a loved canary escaping through the window. Seemingly magically, a blue parakeet flies in almost as if to replace the missing songbird, but it is killed soon after during a bombing raid. Rabbits, which many children nowadays regard as companion animals, were raised for food during a war when everyone was always hungry.

Carle’s stories are dedicated to his father, written in “love and gratitude” for all his dad passed on to him: intense affection for and knowledge of all kinds of creatures (much of it gained during long walks the two took together in the countryside); the joy of picture-making; and the power of storytelling. Carle explains that his father had been drafted into the German army the first day of the war. The two were separated from each other for eight years. Carle’s father had been held for years in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. He returned “a changed and broken man” when Eric was an 18-year-old art student.

While it is true that some of the stories might not be suitable for young children, I should add that I enjoyed these calmly and finely written pieces very much. Though economically told, they provide the reader with a real sense of the personalities of close family members and the tensions between these people. Carle also conveys a lot of factual information about insects, birds, and reptiles, and he charms us with memories of family pets. Not all of the stories are from childhood, and the tales are not chronologically arranged—the result: each story provides a little flash of surprise. One of the more delightful of Carle’s adult memories concerns a cat who liked to play fetch with a string bean tossed to her during dinner preparation. The little feline would signal when she was tuckered out by depositing the bean in one of Eric’s shoes around which she’d then curl her furry body. show less