THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE - For light comedy purposes, as well as for realism, the child character doesn’t understand how naive he is about the outside world.Children of colour from single parent families are more vulnerable, and almost entirely absent from American children’s stories in the early 1980s. He and his parents are white, and his parents are together. This boy is in a relatively stable position compared to many kids. LEVEL OF CONFLICT - I hope one day young readers will look back on these old picture books and think, Wow, imagine what it must have been like to live in a world where you can lose your job and have hardly any money to live on! I hope the 2020 pandemic takes us in the direction of universal basic income, not in the conservative, fascist direction.TECHNOLOGY CRUCIAL TO THIS PARTICULAR STORY - Not applicable.

ARENA - The child is mostly in the home but also at the bus stop, at the shops and on his front steps.

I’m sure this offers Americans a strong clue. When the bohemian woman turns up she’s holding a shopping bag with Zabars on it.

LOCATION - New York? The houses open out onto the street where residents keep trash cans, which I recognise from images of New York but maybe there are other American cities with similar streets.

This maybe takes place over a few weeks, or a few months. In the first part of Tight Times, the storytellers give us insight into what it’s like to live with less money than before.

DURATION - Like many picture books that take place over a day or so, there’s a build-up in which the reader gets a wider view of the child’s life.

These plot points are so old and so embedded in our collective wisdom that other storytellers can make use of them to create a vivid and affecting story, full of pathos like this one. Below I go into how write and illustrator work together to achieve that.Īlso, as the child character heads towards the story’s climax, the storytellers make use of plot points straight out of fairytale, even though this is a story baked in realism. Today in America, one in six children are living in poverty.įrom a storytelling point of view, this picture book is interesting because it does a fantasic job of helping the reader empathise with the boy and his parents. This short picture book elicits some strong emotions, and unfortunately, this story about economic deprivation is just as necessary today as it was at the turn of the 1980s. Tight Times also happens to be the first ever picture book read by LeVar Burton on America’s Reading Rainbow series back in 1983.

Tight Times (1979) is an American picture book written by Barbara Shook Hazen and illustrated in graphite pencil by Trina Schart Hyman.

Trina schart hyman rapunzel