Every time I share my picture book Two Mice (Clarion Books, 2015) with a group of children––like I did recently at Kinderbuchfestival in Basel, Switzerland––a certain passage never fails to excite the spirits. In the story, the mice, after surviving a scary shipwreck, are swimming towards a little island.
When I read the line “One island, two trees,” after a moment of hesitation while studying the picture, most kids start protesting: “Those are not trees! Those are bird’s feet!” To which I respond: “Wait a second: The text clearly states those are two trees. Why would you question that?” “Because we see in the picture that that’s not true! Those are clearly bird’s feet!” At this point, I pause and say: “You all know that I was the one who both wrote the words and drew the pictures. Now you are telling me that you don’t trust my words but you trust my pictures. Why is that? What if I was telling you the truth with the words and lying with the pictures?”
When I move to the next spread, text and drawings seem to agree again, showing in fact a big bird of prey flying away with the mice in its claws. That usually makes the children think “Ha! We were right!” Which in this case is true, but that doesn’t make it a rule.
In my experience, I have never found a child yet who trusts the words more than the pictures. Why is that?
