Picture Book Monday: The Gray Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher

[osprey_archer]

Today in book mending, I enjoyed Svetlana Petrovic's Brown Bear, White Bear, which is about two teddy bears who are identical except for color who fight about who will be their little girl's favorite until she locks one in the closet and puts the other on a high shelf, at which point they must band together to find a way out of their predicament. The high schelf, quite fortunately, comes equipped with a kite.

In keeping with this flying theme, I also liked Valeri Gorbachev's Molly Who Flew Away, which is about a mouse who goes to the fair and buys balloons for all her friends...only for the excess of balloons to pull her into the sky! Who doesn't want to be dragged into the sky by a bunch of balloons? Okay, fine, in real life maybe it would be a trifle terrifying, but it's always great fun to read about, even if the book ends with Molly's friends rescuing her before she floats away forever rather than Up-like adventures.

I've also been clearing out our picture book collection - at some point I'm going to have to sort out my general book collection, but not for a while, because we have to shlep all these picture books to the library first. I'm pretty sure that my parents bought every single picture book ever published with characters named Jennie (this being my name), because my goodness do we have a lot of them.

I also found our old copy of The Gray Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, a picture book that so terrified me in my early childhood that I avoided the whoel section of shelf where it lived just so I wouldn't stumble on it by accident.

The terrifying Gray Lady - a woman who wears a gray dress that allows her to utterly blend into the fog - is pursued by the far more horrifying Strawberry Snatcher, a blue person with long, grasping blue fingers, tipped with scarlet nails as long as talons, who is forever snaking her skinny arms out for the Gray Lady's strawberries and barely missing.

Did anyone else have any picture books they were inexplicably (or perhaps not-so-inexplicably) terrified of when they were younger?

Comments

[blue-eye.livejournal.com]

No, but I had toys that terrified me.

Animated toys and me did not mix.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I always thought furbies were terribly creepy. And jack-in-the-boxes, which aren't exactly animated, I suppose, but are nonetheless weirdly terrible. They pop out of the box! With their terrifying faces!

[blue-eye.livejournal.com]

Furbies came out when I was an adult already, so they didn't do a number on me.

The girl next door had a ballerina doll which scared me, and I had a baby doll that used to move its arms and legs -- terrifying!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Oh goodness, yes. We had a copy of the Three Billygoats Gruff which had a painting of the troll that was so terrifying it reduced Very Small Bunn to utter hysteria, so much so that my parents eventually resorted to putting it in the garage under a pile of breeze blocks, to prevent it from opening the book and sneaking out :-D

And there was a book called something like 'The adventures of the Pussy Willows' in which some twee fluffy kittens float away accidentally by river in a basket, which I couldn't read for YEARS because there was a picture of the terrified kittens grabbing desperately at the trailing twigs of the willow tree with their paws which was terribly upsetting. I think I finally plucked up courage to look inside it again when I was about 16, and discovered that of course the kittens are rescued and all is well, but I never got that far when I was small.

The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher sounds most alarming.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

There have to be some robust children who take picture book illustrations and Disney movies and so forth in stride, because there's an awful lot of scary stuff in there. I think there were about two Disney movies that I watched when I was a kid; all the other ones we tried were just too scary for me.