My daughters and I fell in love with Leo Lionni when we spent the summer in Canada. For this, I must thank a reader, who recommended Lionni as one of her children's favourite authors.
We last visited my parents in Canada three years ago. At that time, my elder daughter was 18 months old and starting to become interested in listening to read-alouds. Rather than load our luggage with the books that were in her repertoire of daily reading. I viewed our holiday as an opportunity to introduce her to new titles.
I ordered books from a Canadian online bookstore for delivery to my parents' home. These included boxed sets of Sandra Boynton's silly board books, plus Polar Bear, Polar Bear and Panda Bear, Panda Bear, the companion books to Bill Martin Jnr's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, which my daughter already knew well.
This summer, my online order comprised solely of Leo Lionni stories: Little Blue and Little Yellow for my younger daughter, and Frederick and His Friends for my eldest. The latter is a collection of stories that is subtitled Four Favourite Fables.
Fables use animals with human qualities to teach a moral lesson. In this collection, two of the stories feature mice, and two of the stories feature fish. The stories are visually captivating for young and old readers, and the moral lessons are about being happy with who you are. They don't focus on the perils of failing to lead a virtuous life, in the way that Aesop's Fables do.
All four stories were written in the 1960s, and use language so rich that my elder daughter asked about a new word every time we reread a story. In Swimmy, Lionni described the eponymous fish as "black as a mussel shell".