Picture Book: The King and the Seed, Eric Maddern & Paul Hess

The King and the Seed
Eric Maddern, illustrated by Paul Hess
ISBN: 9781845079260
Read Feb 24, 2014

I'll start off by saying that I wasn't REALLY fond of the illustrations, which is usually a kiss of death for me.  If I don't feel inspired or connected or touched by the art, it takes a lot of oomph in the story department to get past that.  So, first off:  Sorry, Mr Hess!

Since I AM recommending this, that means that indeed, the storyline and the telling are pretty fantastic.  Once again, personal history means that I am fond of the idea of stories that teach or appeal to a moral foundation, but there's a lot of very religious offerings that I simply cannot in good conscience recommend, and frankly, that leave a bad taste in my mouth when reading them.

So here we have a nice fairy-tale story of a young farmer who is roped into competing for the eventual kingship with a bunch of knights and nobles.  The contest?  Grow a seed.  Of course the knights fail and the farm boy prevails, but in an interesting sort of way, and one that I think makes the whole story work really well for me.

First, we have the obvious moral - the boy who works for a living up against all of these men who either make war (the knights) or laze around all day (the nobles).  That's a good obvious contrast to draw, and a lot of books would stop there and say, obviously the boy grows the seed best because he's a farmer!

But he doesn't!  He tries and tries and finally realizes he has to come back and admit that he failed.  Which is interesting, because at this point, that's actually a lot like life - you think you're good at something, or you want to succeed at something, and you just can't do it.  Lots of books deal with this by magically making the failure into a success (fairy godmothers, anyone?), or by having the character realize what they were stressing out and travailing with wasn't actually important (hate that trope) or they develop a sour grapes attitude.  None of these are particularly helpful in learning to deal with the real world.

So now, this young farmer with his pot of dead dirt is standing in line with all these nobles and knights with their various beautiful and outrageous plantlife, and he's thinking "what the heck?" until  he gets to the king who lets him in on a little secret - all of the seeds he gave out were boiled!  All those plants the knights and nobles are proudly parading around are bright showy proclamations of their guilt - for whatever various personal reasons (left unspoken, but most likely because their higher class status made accepting failure a much harder decision to face than it was for the farmer boy) they decided it was better to fake a success than admit failure.

And here's where I really like it, because in real life, there are a lot of people that fake success.  And while the King chose the farmer boy to be his successor, all those nobles and knights are STILL nobles and knights, with their titles and their money and their power.  And that too is an important lesson to learn.


This book was recommended by The Read-Aloud Handbook