A detail from "A Peep at the Esquimaux", an 1825 children's books published in London, England
The trouble with writing the Picture Perfect feature each week is that you have to read the book, or at least enough of it, in order to put the illustrations into some kind of useful context.
That's not a hard thing to do with an illustrated history of chairs or a collection of medical school dissection photos.
But it can be a bit of a slog with something like this week's book: an academic study of Canadian identity in children's books that contains sentences such as: "There is no singular nationalist metanarrative stemming from a homogeneous culture that would assert a simple answer to the troublesome question of how to identify Canadian identity."
Or this beauty: "The ascription of a mimetic function in the creation of a national literature takes on a particularly complex role in the absence of a unitary cultural narrative."
I am in no position to argue with the authors, or to agree with them. The problem is that the full-colour plates included in the book are quite gorgeous and worthy of a reader's time. They also serve as a quick survey of the history of children's book publishing in Canada.
And, frankly, yes it is interesting to see how Canada has been interpreted for Canadian children by the illustrators and writers of children's books. Which Canada should a child see? West Coast, East Coast, urban, rural, French, English, Chinese, African-Canadian, aboriginal, gay, cowboy, gay cowboy...? Canada is an obsessively diverse country, and there is no reason that kids' books should be exempted from the endless hand-wringing about our national identity that engulfs every other aspect of our culture, from novels to television to pop-music and even, lately, to punditry.
See the images from the book
It was also interesting to learn that images in Canadian children's books have had to be removed for the U.S. market because they were unacceptable to America's strange puritan sensibilities. Such as a child wearing a Halloween costume of a witch. Or a child in a devil mask during a Mexican Day of the Dead scene. Or a skeleton deemed naked because it had no pants on.
So give due credit to the authors for doing what amounts to groundbreaking research in their chosen field, and for raising the question of whether it matters whether a book aimed at a Canadian child is recognizably "Canadian" or not.
(They think it does, for the record.)