(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
There is an inestimable delight to opening a picture book and falling into a story which delivers imaginative and poetic wordplay and vividly arresting, often gorgeous illustrations; it doesn’t matter whether you are reading them to endlessly eager nieces and nephews (in my case) or simply as a diversion from the trials of adult life, you feel somehow like the clock has been wound back and all the best parts of childhood are yours again, if only for a short while.
It’s good the soul and in the case of exemplary picture books like The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt by Riel Nason (writer) and Byron Eggenschwiler (artist) a delight in so, so many ways.
For a start, the character at the heart of the story is every single one of us who has felt, and really is, different from the pack and who feels they are somewhat deficient as a result.
Unlike his mum and sad and friends are light as air sheets, able to whoosh and dart where they please with the greatest of ease, the titular little ghost is weighed down, made of a quilt which weighs him down and makes whooshing anywhere all but impossible, leaving him, after any attempts to do so, sweaty, hot and messily wound up.
It gets even worse when the ghosts encounter people; while his friends can zip off in a nanosecond, away from the gaze of mere mortals, the little ghost often ends up trapped which is not great because human beings are SCARY (“ghosts are terrified of people”).
The little ghost ends up played with by people who think he is just a quilt and sticky and messy and gross, he becomes an object of derision by his friends who frankly aren’t encounter the finest, most empathetic examples of ghostdom.
But everything about little ghost’s life changes one day when a meeting with people goes in a completely direction to what he was expecting.
This defining third act moment gives the book so much richness and joy.
The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt becomes a celebration of the importance and wonder of being different as the little ghost finally realises that being nothing like everyone else is a blessing and not the curse he believed it to be.
The final lines in the picture book absolutely capture your heart and make your soul leap with joy.
Everything that happened was because he was a little bit different. Everything had happened because he was a quilt.
This inspiring message leaps and dances through every part of you, coming alive even more vivaciously with artwork which is beyond beautiful and emotionally evocative, its sense of world-building and time and place perfectly rendered.
Even more amazingly, while the illustrations are lushly monochromatic, they feel awash with the “colour” of life and living, the occasional well-chosen splashes of colour making the artwork feel like a joyously rich and detailed world to inhabit.
A perfect combination of art and wordplay, The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt is the sort of book that kids will adore because it looks cute and the story is happiness inducing and adults will find themselves comforted by in a world where cruelty is all too commonplace, bullying is far too prevalent and we need to be reminded that being different is a brilliantly good thing and not the drawback that bigots would have you believe.
The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt is published by Tundra Books.