What was important about Margaret Wise Brown? Was it that she was a writer—author of Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and other children’s classics? Was it the details of her life, like the color of her hair (“Golden, the color of timothy hay”), the name of her favorite dog (“Crispin’s Crispian”), or the people she fell in love with (“a woman called Michael and a man called Pebble”)?
This verse biography asks questions, but also plays with language and form in ways reminiscent of Brown herself as it amusingly but effectively tells the story of her life and importance. “This is a story about a rabbit,” it says at one point, explaining that when Brown was young, one of her rabbits died, and she skinned it and wore the pelt. “There are people who will say a story like this/doesn’t belong in a children’s book,” writes author Mac Barnett. “But it happened…./And isn’t it important that children’s books/contain the things children think of/and the things children do,/even if those things seem strange?”
People thought Brown was strange, too, Barnett continues, swimming naked in cold water and splurging on flowers and a party for her friends with the money from her first book. Some people are bothered by strange things, Barnett tells us, before asserting that he believes “every good book is at least a little bit strange.” This sets the scene for Brown’s battle with a conservative librarian at the New York Public Library (a little strange herself), who refused to stock any of Brown’s “strange” books. When Brown was turned away from a literary tea party at the library one day, we learn, she sat on the steps with her editor, Ursula Nordstrom (another queer woman with a picture-book biography), forcing people to walk around them. Brown’s rejection by the library—and Barnett’s astute comments about why people fear strange things—offers much fodder for discussion of book censorship today.
At age 42, we read, Brown planned to marry someone she loved and sail around the world—only to die in France. “Lives don’t work the way most books do./They can end suddenly,” Barnett observes. “Lives are strange,” he adds, reminding us again that some people don’t like strangeness, but that “sometimes you find a book that feels as strange as life does.” These books are important, he says. Brown wrote such books, and wrote them for children, because she felt they deserved them, he explains.
This is an absolutely brilliant biography—engaging, informative, and focused on conveying the importance of its subject rather than just the plodding facts. Barnett wields quirky patterns and rhythms to evoke Brown herself as he conveys to readers not only why Brown matters but also (and this is perhaps the larger message) why being a little strange just might be a good thing. It is also one of few picture books that includes a clearly bisexual character. Highly recommended.
