Dealing with a dark mood

Most children know that life with brothers and sisters is not all peace and happiness; there are days when you drive each other crazy – days when nothing you do pleases the other person.

But kind and loving siblings try to help each other through the down times. So when Virginia wakes up feeling wolfish and wants to be left alone and moans and hollers and refuses to be placated and finally crawls back into bed to hide under the covers, her sister Vanessa takes paint brush in hand to transform their bedroom into “Bloomsberry”: the perfect place of Virginia’s imagination.

As Vanessa paints, her sister stops “howling at the moon” and starts to pay attention, eventually joining in. Together, they create a world of colour and Virginia tells the story about a snail that “reached the top of a mountain without realizing it.” In the process of transforming a room of their own, Vanessa succeeds in lightening Virginia’s load and “the whole house lifted. / Down became up. / Dim became bright. / Gloom became glad …”

The publisher’s bumf that accompanied this book quotes from a Kirkus review that “knowledge of Virginia Woolf and her painter-sister Vanessa Bell is unnecessary” – that this book works “as a bad-day/bad-mood or animal-transformation tale” – but for any literate adult reading this story aloud to a child, there will be references that add profound layers to what could otherwise be viewed simply as a juvenile picture book. Either way, it is a thoughtful, gentle treatment of depression and mood swings – something to which most of us can relate, whether we’ve heard of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group or not.

Montreal artist Isabelle Arsenault’s mixed-media illustrations and hand-lettered text (complete with blocks of oversized capital letters to depict Virginia’s raised voice) are a perfect match for Toronto writer Kyo Maclear’s inspired story. All in all, this is a beautiful, sophisticated and highly recommended volume.