I recently saw an announcement about this year’s Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. (Lindgren wrote the Pippi Longstocking stories, and other works.) I knew the work of this year’s winner Jon Klassen. However, perhaps because this award is Swedish, rather than American, some of the past winners were less familiar to me. One of these was Kitty Crowther, a Swedish-British artist-illustrator (who grew up in Brussels), so I picked up one of her books, her Stories of the Night. Boy am I glad I did.
There’s an organic richness to this book. It feels like a very old school fairy tale or a dream: strange details, twists and turns, odd names that are not explained, and so on. There’s very much a feel of this being a real world, and that the reader just stumbled into some snippet of it.
In this case, young bear facing bedtime asks their mother for some stories that say “it’s time to go to sleep.” Their mother tells a story about the Night Guardian’s interactions with a range of creatures, a story about a “little girl with a sword who gets lost” and ends up sleeping in a tall tree, and a third about a “little man called Bo” who has trouble sleeping and ends up talking to his friend “Otto the otter.”
The framing story about the bears returns between each of the stories and at the end–and figures from the stories join the bear in bed.
These stories are not much like other things, and surprise in both image and text in ways that few other books do.
