I have not seen any hats around here.” The bear then encounters a rabbit, who’s wearing a bright red pointy hat, the color of which starkly stands out against the muted earth-tone palette of all the other illustrations in the book. He asks a fox and a frog, and they offer polite, repetitious responses, informing him that, “No. Realizing that his hat is gone, the bear starts to ask other animals in the forest if they’ve seen his hat. But, out of that set-up, Klassen creates an extremely funny scenario. The premise of I Want a Hat Back is gorgeously understated – there’s a bear who’s lost his hat and he wants it back. If you're holding out on me.Īnd it’s a heck of a lot of fun to read too. Fun with language aside, this is a beautiful book – Klassen’s illustrative style reminds me of an exquisite hybrid of Frederick‘s Leo Leonni and A Sick Day for Amos McGee‘s Erin Stead. And yet the blank expressions of the animals – especially the face of the lead character, a bear – can suddenly convey volumes of emotion with only a slight shift of posture or eye position. Even Klassen’s illustrations revel in the art of the deadpan, giving us a menagerie of animal characters with stony, nearly unchanging faces. Named as one of the New York Times best illustrated children’s books of 2011, I Want My Hat Back is a masterpiece of understated, slow-burn humor.
And, if you’re looking for an example of that kind of book, you can hardly do better than I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Funny books do a particularly good job of teaching children about those subtle underlying language rules, and I love watching my daughter realize on her own that, even though a character is seemingly saying one thing, you can infer through the context of the illustrations and the intonation of how the line might be read that the character actually MEANS something completely different.
One of my favorite things about reading books to my daughter is that, through the process of reading out loud, she learns so much about not just language, but also things like intonation, context, sarcasm, and all of those other glorious abstractions that come hand-in-hand with verbal communication.
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