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| Come play with Lilly as the world goes around and the seasons change! |
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A Hidden Treasure
Sometimes the most well-hidden treasures are right in front of our noses. This is certainly the case with Mimi Cracra, Agnès Rosenstiehl’s comic strip series, which for many years has both been read by almost every French child and ignored by the majority of critics. I discovered Mimi Cracra in the same way many parents do: my children were still young, four or five years old, and I was looking for books we could read, reread, and fall in love with. Though I speak and read to my children in French, we live in New York, so I didn’t want to bring home suitcases of the foreign books (many of them American) that are translated into French and fill the shelves of bookstores in Paris–my children would have already read the originals with their father. My search was further complicated by my great love for comic books; I’d seen firsthand how children adore comics, so I was looking for an elusive creature: comic books written in French especially for very young children. And that’s when I found the treasure of Mimi Cracra.
Perhaps critics don’t take a second look because Agnès Rosenstiehl’s books have such child-like simplicity. But the simplicity is deceptive: the drawings, colors, words and layouts have the elegance of a Mozart fugue. The stories in the Mimi Cracra series are universal. In each, the inner monologue that is so typical of children that age brings us into the world of a little girl who is entirely herself and yet is also every child. The books affirm children’s most basic or clever observations of the world, and encourages them to narrate their own stories. We read, we look and we discover the hidden details surrounding us; we reread and discover new connections and new stories to tell. Reading Mimi Cracra is reading on the highest level for a young child. It makes you want to talk about yourself and your world and it makes you want to read the books again and again.
My children have grown up to be avid readers and Agnès Rosenstiehl, in the years since we discovered her work, has continued to publish wonderful books, still beloved by young children and taken for granted by the “experts.” A few years ago, wanting to share the pleasures I had had with my own kids, I decided to launch a new series of comic books designed for early readers. One of the first books we’re releasing this spring is the luminously simple Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, Mimi’s Yankee counterpart. I know American kids will love her but I wonder if, this time, maybe-just-maybe the critics will learn from the kids?
--Françoise Mouly
New York, March 11, 2008 |
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