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CHILDREN'S BOOKS
The World Out There
Books by Jill Biden and Alain Serres


From “Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops”
By PAMELA PAUL
Published: June 6, 2012
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Some of us are more susceptible than others, but it’s not uncommon for picture book illustrations to give almost anyone — grown-ups even more perhaps than children — the goose bumps. And no one’s better at eliciting them than Raúl Colón (“Good-Bye, Havana! Hola, New York!,” “Angela and the Baby Jesus”). In “Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops,” his haunting image of a faded soldier standing outside an autumn window, as imagined by the daughter who awaits him at home, is nearly soaked in melancholy. “Daddy’s not here,” she thinks, “as she watches a red leaf drift past the window and out of sight.”
DON’T FORGET, GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS
By Jill Biden
Illustrated by Raúl Colón
40 pp. Simon & Schuster. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 10)
I HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE A CHILD
By Alain Serres
Illustrated by Aurélia Fronty
Translated by Helen Mixter
48 pp. Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press. $18.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 7)
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Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews
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From “I Have the Right to Be a Child”
The girl in Colón’s picture is 5-year-old Natalie, who is worried and scared when her father is deployed abroad, leaving his family behind struggling to stay strong. She, her mother and her young brother, Hunter, go through the motions of Thanksgiving and the holidays without him. Whether attending church or losing a tooth or playing with toy soldiers, she is repeatedly urged, “Be brave, Natalie.”

“Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops” was written by Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden. Their son is a major in the Army National Guard. This direct emotional connection to the experience of military families permeates the earnest and heartfelt text. But it is Colón’s illustrations that make the small moments — Hunter brushing away a tear, Natalie kissing a photograph of her father in uniform — so deeply affecting.

There is now a near-constant stream of self-published books written by mothers and fathers in military families. They reflect a yearning for narratives about children whose family members have spent time in Afghanistan or Iraq. Biden wisely includes a message from the author, and endnotes about the military and resources to help military families.

Endnotes also clarify the text in “I Have the Right to Be a Child,” a child-friendly version of the rights outlined in the United Nations General Assembly’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Created in 1989, this special code of human rights consists of 54 articles setting forth the obligations of governments toward their children.

Unsurprisingly, the official list of these rights is written in unwieldy bureaucratese. But in Alain Serres’s powerful and inspiring picture book (originally published in French), the words are simplified for young children and narrated in the first person. The opening words, “I am a child with eyes, hands, a voice, a heart, and rights,” are accompanied by images of different-colored hands bearing wide-eyed faces. Aurélia Fronty’s naïf-style illustrations, which resemble those of Giselle Potter, are bright and colorful even when accompanying sentences like “I have the right never to experience the storm of war or the thunder of weapons.”

To date, 193 nations have signed the convention — in fact, every member state of the United Nations save three: Somalia, South Sudan and the United States. Was it “I have the right to be cured with the best medicines that were ever invented” or “I have the same rights whether I am a girl or a boy”? The book offers no opinion on such divisive matters. Not all stories about the larger world outside, alas, are happy ones.

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