Come, Read with Me

A Canadian writer, editor, teacher and international traveller, Ruurs sets a high value on reading with children and fostering understanding through books. (Her 2016 work, Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey, about the experience of refugees, has won acclaim around the world.) In Come, Read With Me, she is inviting adults and children to share the joy of reading together.

We begin with:

Come, let’s read.

Cuddle closer and open your eyes,

Let’s look at pictures and fly through the skies.

The adventures on these pages are as old as the ages,

so let’s read…

Two children of indeterminate sexes, one afro-topped and dark-skinned, the other with a dark bob and wearing overalls, wander along through a land of imagination. Ruurs uses a short, bouncing text to introduce a cast of storybook and folktale characters and incidents. There are sly nods to stories such as Moby Dick, Humpty Dumpty and Hansel and Gretel. This passage is an indicator of how references to the various figures from literature are interwoven:

There’s a yellow brick road that leads out of town.

Put on your glass slippers and straighten your crown.

Let’s follow these breadcrumbs into the wood.

We’ll go visit our friend in a red riding hood.

The rhyme never quite settles into a regular metre (“…a jungle of wild things who march to their very own beat. Do you see all the places we’ll go, the personalities we’ll meet?”), and a few lines are left stranded without the companion we expect.

This page near the end is among the most satisfying in regard to both its scansion and the image that it conjures.

And when we get tired, you’ll sit and drink tea

with a friend, her white rabbit, and, of course, me!

The wolf comes along to steal a nip from our table,

Let’s be kind and invite him to hear this fine fable.

Finally, we find we have come full circle to the invitation of the first page and the comforting figure of the adult who has offered this fantastical journey through reading.

Come, cuddle closer…now close your eyes.

The story is finished, and the moon is here till sunrise.

If happily ever after is now,

let’s keep reading books together and vow

that this once upon a time is the best time together.

The illustrations are in a bold but unpolished style, using vivid colour and a variety of media. There is more than a hint of the childlike in the execution. The two young explorers are shown as being small in comparison to the settings of their adventures, dwarfed by the castles, jungles and rushing expanses of water that dominate the scenes. There is intriguing detail to examine in every spread.

In spite of its flaws, Come, Read with Me is a book that parents, primary teachers and librarians can use to introduce a discussion of the world of children’s books. As for the child readers themselves, they will enjoy the game of identifying the literary references hidden in the lines.