A Plan for Pops

Lou is both excited and grateful to spend every Saturday with Grandad and Pops. Lou gets to have breakfast with them (“Grandad has toast with Jam. Pops has colorful cereal…. Lou has both”), and then they spend the day going to the library (“They walk hand in hand, like a chain of paper dolls”), eating lunch, and, while Pops has a nap, Lou and Grandad tinker “with nuts and bolts and bits of wood.” But during one particularly cold Saturday, Pops takes a tumble and ends up in the hospital. When Pops is released, he is very unhappy and is unable to go anywhere without a wheelchair.

The second half of the story follows Lou’s attempts to get Pops out of bed and make the world once again a manageable place to visit. Earlier, Lou and Grandad spend time together coming up with gizmos and gadgets, and this inventiveness now comes in handy as Lou tries to come up with a contraption to help Pops out of bed. Eventually some music and a cup of juice (with a paper umbrella) help to get Pops in the mood to let Gramps and Lou take him out again, into the town, even to the library. Lou surprises Pops with some beautiful paper cranes and other adventures, and, in the end, the two older men and Lou continue to support each other and enjoy life even after the incident that leaves Pops unable to walk on his own.

Accompanied by Kerrigan’s muted, pastel-coloured illustrations and (mostly) white backgrounds, Smith’s narrative creates a fully rounded and sympathetic storyline with characters with whom youngsters will likely be able to identify. The fact that Grandad and Pops are both men is secondary (if not tertiary) to the story, not to mention the fact that Lou is never identified through gendered pronouns or even through visual cues in the illustrations. I think the subtlety will help with the storytelling aspect as adults/parents read to children and attempt to answer the questions of child audiences. A Plan for Pops is a delicious, enjoyable, and necessary narrative for modern families with a non-normative makeup.