was inspired by the death of one of Jeffers’s close relatives. Rich in significant imagery, it has the uncompromising quality of a fairytale. You don’t question it. The text is spare and straightforward while the illustrations work overtime – airy widescreen elemental landscapes are interleaved with the rich colours and warm textures of family life – and Jeffers also makes eloquent use of the plain white space that so importantly gives pause for thought in what is often the hurly- burly of the picture book.


Photo © Malcolm Brown


Jeffers has been ‘hugely affected’ by Sendak’s work: ‘Sendak wasn’t really writing for children,’ he muses, ‘he was writing for himself. And importantly he never patronised young readers – that’s really one of the very worst things you can do’. And throughout the wildly imaginative diversity of his own work, Jeffers never spoon-feeds, or talks down to children – he simply credits them with the ability not just to enjoy, but to explore, understand and inhabit the story, immerse themselves in it. And if necessary to question it …


Jeffers talks a lot about the gap between logical thinking and emotional understanding. The Heart and the Bottle is an extraordinary example of how a picture book really can make you think, however old you are. A young girl is grieving over the loss of her grandfather. Inconsolable, she takes her heart out and puts it in a bottle for safe keeping. But then when the time comes, she has great difficulty retrieving it and putting it back where it belongs. This story


Jeffers is well known for his landscape painting but in This Moose Belongs to Me, he has appropriated the work of a Victorian painter Alexander Dzgursky. This ‘borrowing’ adds a further dimension to an interesting theme of ownership in a very beautiful, wryly funny story about a huge moose who has been befriended by a young boy. It’s a glorious friendship, but the boy gets a shock when he finds that he’s not the only ‘owner’ of the moose, who has been generously befriended by several other people in the area (remember Six Dinner Sid?).


Finally, everyone,


one question including me,


wants to know is why all Jeffers’s characters have such stiff straight legs. No knees. Why? ‘Well it has become a bit of thing,’ he admits, ‘and though you might think it’s an easy option, it can be quite difficult to make it work.’ In Stuck, for instance, the boy throws everything he can find – including a rhinoceros – into a tree to release his kite: ‘I had to make several attempts to get that rhinoceros looking natural up a tree.’


Books, all published by HarperCollins Children’s Books:


Once Upon an Alphabet, 978-0-0075-1427-4, £20.00 Lost and Found, 978-0-0071-5036-6, £6.99 Imaginary Fred, 978-0-0081-2614-8, £12.99 How to Catch a Star, 978-0-0071-5034-2, £6.99 The Heart and the Bottle, 978-0-0071-8234-3, £6.99 This Moose Belongs to Me, 978-0-0072-6390-5, £6.99 Stuck, 978-0-0072-6389-9, £6.99


Joanna Carey is a former Children’s Books Editor of The Guardian.


Books for Keeps No.215 November 2015 5


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