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Book Review: Petit, The Monster By Isol
March 24th, 2010
Do you cringe when you hear the phrase bad boy? (Or good girl for that matter, a catcall-like offense.) I sometimes, okay, maybe always, make the good boy mistake myself (though with a toddler, I have to say that happens less and less.) And because I’ve never really thought out the whole reasoning behind it, I’m not as on the lookout for it as I should be.
As evidenced by a recent University of Iowa study, toddlers feel remorse for misbehaviour. But trouble is, most little ones get confused. That’s because they’re not able to discern between themselves and their behaviour, thus internalizing inappropriate messages like shame, while we’d prefer they focus on the action-related part, remorse (that’s where the roots of empathy come in). Hence the whole “talk about the behaviour, not the child” mantra.
Petit, a good little boy with a big-hearted question
So what to do if you’ve already headed down the bad boy path? Petit, The Monster, a small gem of a picture book, brilliantly addresses the confusion: “How can such a good boy sometimes do such bad things?”
Petit is a perplexed little boy who plays well with his dog, but is mean to pigeons, who is nice to his grandpa, yet pulls a girl’s hair.
Is he “Good for nothing? Bad at everything?” Brilliant, funny and big-hearted, his story concludes with a lovely message in moral ambiguity: that not even mummy is perfect.
Petit, the Monster by Isol (Groundwood, $17) is available through amazon.ca.
—Melissa, CF‘s lifestyle editor
Copyright © 2012 St. Joseph Media. All Rights Reserved.