I've recently become very interested in children's picture books, and for all of you who have tiny humans of your own, or work in the elementary panel and want to bring Canadian content into your reading routine, these mini reviews are for you!
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In Spork, your kitchen utensils are brought to life as a vibrant little community. Like any community, however, there are norms and the cliques that establish them, leading to discrimination. Spork is the child of a spoon mother and a fork father, and although there are a few other examples in his kitchen of diverse families, Spork feels very much alone. He is excluded by the forks, the spoons, and the humans that invite the cutlery to the table for dinner because he is "neither spoon nor fork... but a bit of both." In the book, Spork tries to change himself to fit in, but is still rejected. Finally, the day comes when "a messy thing" comes to shake things up in the kitchen and helps Spork see that he is perfect just the way he is.
There are a few reasons why I think this book is important. Firstly, Maclear is tackling a very common and complex issue for many children and families in an accessible way. There are many reasons why a child might feel like they are in the middle between two seemingly concrete identities, not one, not the other, but a little bit of both. In these cases, it is natural to feel left out and to want to change oneself to fit in. It is also, unfortunately, not unusual to be targeted because of this difference. Through the character of Spork, children can see their own struggles reflected, feel validated in their feelings of loneliness, and can also take heart that there is a spot in the world just for them, requiring their uniqueness to fill it.
Secondly, something Maclear does consciously (based on a workshop she ran at the FOLD festival in 2018) is to use language that you wouldn't expect in a children's book. She believes in challenging and expanding the minds of children by not always giving them the same, easy language to read. Spork uses phrases like "cutlery customs" that would require some unpacking for a child. This is great because it allows for the reader to interact with the child and have discussions about the language and what it is describing, giving more depth to the regular story-time routine.
Finally, something else Maclear chooses to do is to give the illustrator room to put their own mark on the text. For example, in Spork, the "messy thing" is never directly identified. The illustrator, Isabelle Arsenault, also chose to leave the "messy thing" as a mystery until the second last page, when the reader is at last shown what it is. At that point it seems like the obvious choice, but, technically, Arsenault could have gone in whatever way she wanted because of the freedom Maclear left in the text. There are also some really lovely pictures of the "lonely creatures out there with no matching kind" where Arsenault had fun showing what the mating of a bunch of random kitchen gadgets would look like, for example a rolling pin and a corkscrew. When the author leaves something up to the imagination of the illustrator, the book as a whole benefits.
This little book should be on bookshelves in schools and libraries so that the parents and educators of all the kids who are a "bit of both" can help to show them that they are "just right".
*The publisher provides educational resources! Check them out here: https://www.kidscanpress.com/products/spork
📚 Ms. CAN Lit
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