On the wall of my living room is a drawing by the late artist Tomi Ungerer. It’s of a bearded man in medieval garb clutching a book and an enormous knife. He’s grinning wickedly at a child screaming in a boiling cauldron, heated by a pile...
Let this be the moment the phrase “Klassen eyes” was coined. Whether a bear’s or a boy’s, on a fish or a dog or a duck, the eyeballs Jon Klassen straps onto his characters put in a lot of work.
I can’t claim to have had a love affair with picture books when I was a boy. We read them, or at least my mother recalls falling asleep halfway through, but my parents weren’t really bookish types.
