The other day I made a Twitter/Facebook comment about how I hate escorting kids to what I call our “military glorification section,” and how I wish we could subversively shelve The Enemy there.  I believe my remarks demand a review, and what better time than the International Day of Peace 2009?

Davide Cali.  The Enemy:  A Book about Peace.  Illustrated by Serge Bloch.  Schwartz & Wade, 2009.  40 pages.  Age 4 to 8.

The Enemy is about two soldiers, on opposing teams, each in his own foxhole.  Our narrator was shown smiling the day he received his kill-those-savages-before-they-kill-you manual, but by the story’s initial narration he’s grown disheartened, to say the least.  He wonders if everyone has forgotten about them, or if maybe he and the so-called enemy are the last two people on earth.

By the end of the book, a truce is called for.  Even so, “A Book about Peace” is an inaccurate subtitle, presumably tacked on to appeal to the most likely audience for this book.  What the book is actually about is questioning authority and the validity of what we read; the common ground between all people; and taking ownership of one’s own situation.  That and, you know, War Is Bad, but I think that’s a secondary message.

The Wall Street Journal published a reactionary review of The Enemy, written by Meghan Cox Gurdon back in April.  Gurdon says the purpose of this “pure propaganda” is to “perplex children” and “inculcate a pacifist worldview as early as possible.”  I suppose it could be used as propaganda from either side of the fence, but to assume that inculcation is the book’s primary purpose is unfortunate.

It’s no huge secret that I’m more or less a pacifist.  It’s also no secret that I want to raise kids my kids to think for themselves.  I have hopes for them, but not expectations.  So, how I will use this book is like I use any other book with substance:  as a conversation-starter.  How did they get there?  Why do they continue to fight?  Do you think the others forgot about them?  And so on.  The questions can be adapted depending on the needs and maturity of the reader, and all of this can be done without suggestion or persuasion from the person asking the questions.

Gurdon made another comment that irked me.  She said that the idea behind the book was to “invite [readers] to believe that nothing is worth fighting for — when adults should know better.”  That is way outside the scope of this book.  No one is saying that there aren’t things worth defending—not even me!—but that doesn’t mean all fights serve a noble purpose.  The one in this story certainly didn’t.

To her credit, Gurdon did nutshell the book accurately: “Think of it as a kind of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ for the elementary-school set, though with chic, inventive illustration.”  That description is both poetic and apt.

[ Posted in » Book Review Channel :: Picture Book Reviews ]