Pondering Life’s Mysteries
Lauren Soloy’s gorgeous new picture book Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem is a step back in time. It’s a story about Henrietta Darwin and her famous father Charles Darwin and their laps on The Sandwalk where they solve problems with a rambling walk in nature.
The book is full of colour in a comic and prose style. Parents with young children will be very familiar with the interactions between Charles and Etty, all the chitter chatter that happens when you take a walk with a young child. They solve a lot of life’s problems on their walks in nature, a fantastic reminder to young readers of the power of the natural world to clear the mind and provide comfort. I love that the problem they are trying to solve is the existence of fairies and as they finish laps of The Sandwalk they use pebbles to mark their progress. It takes four pebbles to come to a conclusion while wondering about all the beauty that surrounds them.
I am enjoying the picture books that are told in part comic and part prose style, giving young readers a taste of the graphic or comic style of writing while also appealing to those who love a good literary story. Our favourite illustration is the full page spread of the fox. It is stunning and surprising and one of our favourite moments in the story. During the story, there is no ultimate conclusion to the question about fairies but there are a lot of questions that lead to hypotheses which then lead to more questions. It’s wonderful for children to know that having the answers sometimes is less important than knowing the questions to ask and following their thinking, even if it just leads to more questions. This is how we make sense of the world.
This book falls within the narrative non-fiction category. As Lauren Soloy notes at the end of the story, everything written is about two people who actually existed and their walks together, pondering on The Sandwalk. While we don’t know the exact content of their chats and discussions, we know that Etty likes to write fairy stories so can infer that they may have talked about them as well. As with all awesome non-fiction, there is a section at the end of the book in the author’s note to let readers know about the real people behind the story and how Etty Darwin was a huge help to her famous father and his work.
