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While sitting in Washington Square Park reading my Moomins novel while on a mini-lunch break I wondered about the recurring use of sadness and melancholy in the book. Do American children books usually refer to the the joys of a sweet melancholy feeling at the lose of something good that will never return? How do children relate to depressed characters? Do they even notice it? Why aren't more children books filled with melancholy, and not in a humorous way? While the sun beat down on my bench, and the film crew near the fountain apparently were also on lunch from filming what looked like a 'dancing in the streets' movie, and the girl sitting the next bench over was losing in a battle of wits against a pigeon who was not going to be fooled into giving up the cracker she dropped I thought about these things.

Then I came home and read this book.

This book is to the Moomins as finding yourself laying in bed staring at the ceiling at 3am realizing that half your life is over all the good things are past and only pain and regret are ahead of you and having a slightly sad tinged memory of a something wonderful in the past that you will never be able to return to. There is something devastating about this story, and the whole format of the book, from the typesetting and font used to the color of the pages used in the book and the illustrations all work in a harmony to create this strong affect.

I'm not sure how kids would react to this, I think from a child's perspective they would only see a story that kind of follows a kind of familiar pattern they are already familiar with. They might find it kind of sad, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Or maybe it will depress them and turn them at a young age to the happy joys of reading literature filled with despair.