Adela Turin

In this English version of “Una fortunate catastrofe,” the Ratigan family lives a quiet life in a modest hole between the kitchen and the cupboard of a comfortable house. Life is predictable until the pipe next to the Ratigan hole bursts and pours huge waves of water into the Ratigan home. What will become of Mr. and Mrs. Ratigan and the eight little Ratigans? Where will they find a new home?

Published by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, this book is one of the Cooperative’s non-sexist children’s literature offerings. Delightful illustrations accompany this charming story that is sure to captivate young readers.

Recommended.… (more)

A herd of elephants enforces gender separation in this feminist fable, ensuring that their female members maintain their beautiful candy pink color and bright eyes by always eating anemones and peonies. Walled off in a little garden where their food - which was more aesthetic than nutritious - grew, the little girl elephants led a safe and contained life, one whose primary goal was being beautiful, and eventually finding a husband. The gray boy elephants, in the meantime, roamed the savannah, ate grass, and had fun swimming and wallowing in the mud. And then one day a little gray girl elephant named Daisy came along, and somehow, no matter how hard they tried, her parents simply couldn't make her pink...

Originally published in Italian in 1976 as Rosaconfetto, this classic of European picture-book literature has been translated into English before - in 1976 it was published by the London-based Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative as Sugarpink Rose - but Spanish publisher NubeOcho has once again made it available to English-speaking children with the release of Candy Pink. This is cause for celebration! As someone with an interest in the translation of children's literature, someone who often laments the wealth of children's books unavailable to us here in the Anglophone world, I am always excited to learn of new publishers crossing linguistic and national borders to make international children's stories more readily available. That being the case, I was quite excited to meet a representative of NubeOcho recently, and to be given a copy of this picture-book to look at.

I confess that I had my doubts, going in to Candy Pink - "an examination of gender that references pink? couldn't the author have been more original?" I thought - but they proved baseless. If anything, Adela Turin was being original, when one considers that Rosaconfetto was first published in 1976 (the year I was born!). The more I considered it, in fact, the more I realized just how relevant this story, and the idea of "pink" segregation, still is. I often have concerned parents approach me for recommendations for their young daughters, and they frequently ask explicitly for something "non-pink, non-princessy, non-sparkly." Whilst no believer that a few pink sparkles are necessarily harmful - I like sparkly greeting cards myself - there's a huge difference between liking something pink every once in a while, as part of a balanced 'diet' of colors, and feeling that pink is a specifically gendered color, one that is only suitable for girls, who have an obligation to conform to some sort of enforced ethos of femininity based upon it. I suspect that some readers might find Turin's narrative a trifle didactic, but there is no question in my mind that the lesson it seeks to impart is, as the blurb on the back cover maintains, "still necessary." The story itself, moreover, has the appeal that tales about child non-conformists often do, while the artwork, done by Nella Bosnia, has a kind of vintage charm. There is a satirical element to the visuals here - the scenes in which the pink girl elephants are dressed up in ruffles has an absurd humor - that complements the social commentary in the text.

In sum: a book well worth seeking out, both as an example of a classic of European children's books, and as a feminist fable about gender equality, and freedom from enforced gender expectations.… (more)