One week before Freedom to Read Week in 1992, the International Woodworkers of America union in B.C. demanded that the Sunshine Coast School District remove all copies of a picture book called Maxine’s Tree from their school libraries. Apparently the daughter of one of the union loggers had come home crying after reading the book, disturbed at its anti-clearcutting message. After the initial fracas, cooler heads prevailed and the loggers withdrew their request. Looking back, it is clear that this skirmish was not about forest practices but about two emotionally charged human desires: the desire of children to understand and help in the adult world, and the desire of adults to have their work respected by their own children.

This season sees two picture books that reflect traditional occupations from a child’s point of view. Maxine returns in Who’s in Maxine’s Tree?, written by Diane Carmel Léger and illustrated by Darlene Gait. The little girl and her family visit the Walbran Valley as volunteer trail-builders and Maxine discovers that her favourite tree, a huge sitka spruce, has become home to marbled murrelets, an endangered West Coast seabird. Maxine’s information comes from Stephanie, a tree-climbing scientist who is researching murrelet habitats.

Stephanie is the coolest element in the book, shooting her climbing line into the huge tree using a crossbow and then ascending using rope, pulley, and sling. Who would have thought that tree climbing could be a job? What child would not want such a job? The material that constitutes this story is fascinating and hugely appealing to children: crossing a creek in a homemade cable car, exploring a moss-lined hemlock cave, hearing a tree with a mysterious voice. The execution is, however, a disappointment. Neither the pedestrian text nor the lacklustre illustrations do justice to the grandeur of the rainforest or the passion of the people who work to save it. Efforts toward shaping the facts into fiction feel strained.

In Roundup at the Palace, written by Kathleen Cook Waldron and illustrated by Alan and Lea Daniel, we meet two working kids. From the opening line we are with Zack and his job. In swirling snow and early morning darkness, young Zack is loading a huge bull named Buster into a pickup, to take him to the National Western Stock Show in Denver. We leave Zack and his dad driving through a blinding blizzard along icy roads, singing country songs, and switch our attention to Alice, another working child. Alice and her mother fight their way through the snow from their apartment to the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel, where they work in the Palace gift shop.

These two stories begin to merge at the moment that Buster breaks out of the pickup, takes off down Denver’s main street, and rushes right into the hotel. When Alice runs out of the gift store right into the path of the “steaming,
snorting bull,” Zack comes to the rescue by giving Alice quiet, calm advice. “Talk to him softly, say anything, but say it softly.” When talking doesn’t look as though it’s going to work, Alice sings. Bumbling adults threaten the fragile stand-off, but then Zack’s dad arrives and says the most heartwarming lines in the book: “Don’t move. Don’t alarm him. The boy knows what to do.” And the boy does. Order is restored and the cool-headed Alice is rewarded with a temporary job as a cowhand.

This story is that rare thing – a plausible, realistic tale in which the child protagonists solve the problem themselves. The action is beautifully shaped, with the two stories coming together, linked by music. The pace moves smoothly between motion and rest, and the tone, a delicate balance of almost-slapstick and genuine danger, is pitch-perfect. Waldron has fashioned a heart-stopping, funny, moving gem of a story.

The author-illustrator collaboration here is also brilliant. The Daniels create a piece of genuine theatre. The backdrops – dark barn, snowy purple dawn, chandelier-lit hotel lobby – lull us with their beauty so that when the bull breaks through we almost jump out of our seats. The bull, a huge mass of panicky muscle, bursting off the page, roars right across four double-page spreads until he pauses and we are whisked up to a high lobby balcony to survey, with other hotel guests, the chaos and tension below. In the course of 17 drawings the characters became so real to me that I caught myself hoping that Alice’s mother and Zack’s father might get together. The final endpaper sketch feeds my fantasy.