In The Composition, nine-year-old Pedro asks if he, like his parents, is against the dictatorship in their country. His mother replies, “Children aren’t against anything. Children are just children. They have to go to school, study hard, and be good to their parents.” But the events in this story and in another recently published picture book, Duncan’s Way, suggest that children do have roles to play in what have long been considered strictly adult concerns. Duncan’s Way, set in Newfoundland, follows the plan of an 11-year-old boy to find a new job for his father, an unemployed fisherman. The Composition, set in South America, tells of Pedro’s solution to a military-sponsored essay designed to betray the political views of the schoolchildren’s parents.

These two books stand out in the excellence of their craftsmanship, both in their writing and their illustrations. But they are also noteworthy for the questions their subjects raise about the limits of the picture book genre. First, there is the question of whether it is possible to provide enough of a context for major political and socio-economic problems within the brevity of this format. Even if an author could do justice to the complexity of the problem, there is a risk of driving home a sense of powerlessness among the traditionally very young audience. On the other hand, if a happy ending is thrown in to quell anxiety, there is the insult of false assurances. A balance needs to be struck between inducing panic and trivializing serious situations, and I think Duncan’s Way and The Composition make admirable attempts at this by offering hopeful messages without a fairy-tale promise of happily ever after.

Duncan’s Way comes across as the more optimistic of the two stories, playing up, as it does, the boy’s self-empowerment through both words and illustrations. For instance, at the turning point of the tale, just as Duncan gets a flash of insight about how his father can return to his fishing boat, we see him towering over a model of the Newfoundland coastline from a god-like perspective. The last scene shows him in a central position in the family, standing between older brother and father on the refurbished boat, now a travelling bakery. (The characters in the book are modelled after the family of Canadian YA fiction writer Kevin Major, possibly in appreciation of the influence of Major’s 1980 novel, Far From Shore, which also deals with unemployment in Newfoundland.) The conclusion tells us that the family is trying out Duncan’s solution, but stops short of promising that it will work in the long run.

In The Composition, as in Duncan’s Way, expressive paintings highlight the connection between landscape and the boy’s growing awareness of the need to survive. In one scene, Pedro appears to be dwarfed by the massive brick wall behind him. Later, in one of the final scenes, we see the wall again, now bearing the word Resistencia, a graffiti statement that mirrors Pedro’s quiet accomplishment. This book, too, ends with a sense of tenuous victory. Pedro has kept his parents’ anti-fascist stance a secret by weaving a bit of fiction into his composition. How long their safety will last is anyone’s guess.

It is difficult to say what impression of unemployment and dictatorship young children will take from these stories, but that may be beside the point. The Composition and Duncan’s Way are not manifestos; they are tales of individual children’s ingenuity and instincts for survival.