Looking at picture books with fresh eyes

This book is a joy. The challenging and entertaining re-readings of a huge number of children's picture books from the nineteenth century on are presented by the poet Clare Pollard with wit, insight and fascinating detail. It's full, original and constantly fresh, even on topics such as Beatrix Potter's fine line between savagery and sentiment which has been explored before, but the details here are new..

Pollard gives us interpretations from various theorists, many of them tiresomely political - is poor old Babar really merely an instrument of repugnant propaganda? After detailing extreme Nazi-centric interpretations of Judith Kerr's The Tiger who Came to Tea, Pollard quotes in fairness Kerr's own comment "A tiger can be just a tiger".

I loved the picture book writers' biographical details which illuminate the stories - Eric Carle's childhood WW2 privations fired the Hungry Caterpillar's gorging; the tragedy of Julia Donaldson's severely schizophrenic son makes The Stick Man heart-rending. Pollard's own autobiographical memories of her childhood shaped by stories make this a very personal book. She has unearthed a multitude of writers' details - such as Ruskin at 63 asking his special friend Kate Greenaway to paint him little girls without their frocks. Storybook idylls ate smashed: Allison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit is a model of good little domestic rabbitness, but Uttley herself nagged her husband to suicide (it was said), and she loathed her lovely illustrator Margaret Tempest. You thought Mr Men-land was harmless fun? How all the characters are in fact Mr Men-ed into namelessness is disturbing in Pollard's readings!

Pollard raises a range of questions. Why and how did traumatic , tragedy-clouded childhoods inspire so many of these writers and artists? Are publishers now accepting work merely because they know it will spawn money-spinning franchises and shedloads of worthless merchandise? In an attempt to make boys keener readers, do we have to have 'boy books' where boys can 'relish the excremental' whilst little girls get princesses and unicorns? It's all lively stuff. I loved it.

Clare Pollard is a warm narrator of her own work, as unpretentious as her written work.

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