“A View Of Mount Warning” is an Australian short story by Robert Drewe, and can be found in his collection The True Colour Of The Sea.
Honestly, I’m pretty much done with reading about middle-aged men who develop crushes on younger women, especially when the point of view centers so firmly on the man, inevitably objectifying the woman and underscoring the idea that men’s sexual desire is paramount.
“Bedrock” is a short story from Annie Proulx’s collection Heart Songs, published 1999. This is a subversive feminist tale, which challenges the readers assumptions about ‘gold-digger’ women and especially those we dismiss as ‘rednecks’.
Gray, the color we attach to characterless people, often suggests bleakness, lack of intensity, a cool detachment. The oppressively predominating gray of the stone walls surrounding Snow White’s mother in Burkert’s picture of her demands our detachment from her but also contrasts with the vibrantly colored patterns we see surrounding her as we look through her window into her room; perhaps as a foreshadowing of her daughter’s fate, she is a small spot of lively beauty in an otherwise bleak and forbidding world. In Inter-city, the wordless story of a train trip, Charles Keeping creates a similar relationship between what can be seen around a window and what can be seen through it. The feeling of boring detachment in the predominantly brownish grey pictures of passengers on a train contrasts with the vibrant colors of the world outside the train’s windows, which the passengers ignore. The contrast between the monochrome of the passenger pictures and the rich colours of the window pictures supports the central theme of the book: we see the passengers as they themselves see the world, and we see the richness of the world they miss because they do not bother to look at it.
– Words About Pictures, Perry Nodelman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1s5PilVZn8
and below is an interior image from Inter-City.
Most of these greys have a hue to them. Yellow greys, orange greys… Then there is completely desaturated grey.
Daniel Miyares
Forest green makes an interesting accent colour against grey — it’s more often something bright like yellow.
Critics love Maurice Sendak. For a lot of academic stuff about Where The Wild Things Aresee here.
For a post on The Picturebooks of Chris Van Allsburgh see here.
This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen shows that toddlers can cope with the horror genre.
“Jon Klassen’s darkly humorous illustrations are a joy to behold. Deceptively simplistic, the expressions and events that he captures, which range from the sublime to the sinister, are utterly wonderful.”
– The CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal judges’ commentary
Someone on Goodreads called this a “hard-boiled crime thrillers for toddlers”. This is fairly apt description! Below I will refer to a number of 1 and 2 star reviews of this book on Goodreads, because these reviewers say something interesting about what adults think is good for children, and what should be kept from them. Committees who award big prizes are a lot less conservative than many book buyers, but I fear it’s the book buyers who drive the market.
