A Garden of Creatures

In A Garden of Creatures, Heti and Shapiro have created something thoughtful and beautiful. Many children’s books about death are rooted in religion. Some others are more obtuse or abstract in the ways they talk about death. This book is neither of those things. It does not shy away from naming death, and yet it still manages to approach the topic with sensitivity and compassion. Equally suited to preemptively explaining the concept of death to a young person or bringing comfort to a child dealing with loss, this picture book strikes an excellent balance of honesty and empathy.

Our story opens with three creatures. There is an older, toast-coloured bunny, a younger soft white bunny, and a “rose-and-buttercream-colored” cat, that is also depicted as being older. After falling ill, the older of the two bunnies passes away. A young child comes to bury the older bunny and to leave a note on the grave, and the child is not seen again (until the end of the story where the child appears in a two-page spread). The rest of the story consists of the younger bunny speaking with the cat, trying to process both the feelings of loss and to understand the concept of death.

It feels appropriate that this book is called A Garden of Creatures because it is full of little seeds of wisdom. As the cat explains death, she’s careful to explain that it is not a punishment. She employs the Socratic Method to great effect: When the bunny asks if death is painful, the cat replies that she imagines it is like the time before being born and asks the bunny if that time was painful. The bunny finds that she can’t remember. Where some authors might diverge here and have the young bunny search for Ultimate Truth, Heti does something quietly radical in allowing the young bunny to accept the truth that she doesn’t, and maybe can’t, know something, and has her move on with her day instead of getting stuck on this moment. This doesn’t mean the concept is done being explored, but just that the bunny is not hung up on this one aspect (which will likely not ring true to the parents of many young children, but it is a great model of being able to accept that not everything can be known or understood). Eventually, after a dream, the cat and the bunny use the metaphor highlighted in the text excerpted above of the elder bunny becoming a garden that we live in. This both seems to highlight the natural cycle of things but also serves to create a common language, of sorts, through which the creatures can think about and process their feelings about death. The closing quote, “The whole world is a garden of creatures” allows for reflection on the fact that everyone else experiences these feelings as well and alludes to a way of approaching inter-connectedness from a secular viewpoint.

The illustrations in the book are both beautiful and whimsical, and it’s worth quoting the front matter to capture their essence. It reads: “The artwork in this book was made with watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, collage and countless bowls of soup with swirling clouds of dumpling creatures.” The young bunny is, as you might picture, a typical bunny in a picture book, but the older creatures, the cat and the toast-coloured bunny, have whimsical bushy eyebrows and wispy beard-like whiskers to show their age. This lends them a dream-like, almost magical quality. The garden is lush, full of flowers of various types and colours which are being visited by moths and butterflies. The skies are rendered in beautiful blues, greens, pinks, and teals at various times of day. They are full of wispy lines, like swirling clouds in soup, that echo the wispy whiskers of the creatures, and allude to the ending thesis of the world being a garden of creatures. Most pages are two-page spreads, but Shapiro also knows when to pull back to allow breathing room. Notably, two of the pages containing the most emotional scenes in the book feature almost no background at all to highlight the emotion and interaction between, or absence of, characters.

A Garden of Creatures is a rare type of picture book that approaches a heavy topic head-on, but with gentleness and whimsy. This is a solid first purchase for both school and public libraries. Filling the niche of books dealing with death that do not have a religious bent, this book helps to fill a gap that many parents have doubtless come across when looking for books on death. Often, parents are searching not for nonfiction explainers but for narratives that their children might relate to. While it will undoubtedly require some help from parents for younger children to grasp the metaphors, Heti and Shapiro’s work is a true gem.