The little boy wants to play, and he wants to engage his mother somehow. But this is more of a ‘psychological need’. One of our major desires as humans is to be taken seriously, and this applies equally to children. The boy’s major shortcoming is that he is a child and adults don’t take him seriously. Hence ‘the’ little boy, not ‘a’ little boy:

The ONLY time we don’t know this boy is the very first time we read it, but picture books are read many, many times. The story opens with an in medias res sort of statement which reminds me a lot of Margaret Wise Brown’s openings, seen for instance in The Sailor Dog, in which it is assumed we already know this boy.

STORY STRUCTURE OF A LION IN THE MEADOWĪlthough this isn’t a cumulative plot per se, Mahy makes use of cumulation in this story, with one scary thing leading to another scary thing. In 2013, an image from the book appeared on a postage stamp.

This book was Mahy’s personal first, and remains one of the most influential children’s books to have come out of my home country. This in turn was influenced by works such as Where The Wild Things Are, in which children see monsters which adults cannot. She ends up leaving him in someone else’s cart - he’s so terrible.Īs part of this Chicken Licken tradition, New Zealand gave us Margaret Mahy and Margaret Mahy gave us A Lion In The Meadow. This theme was explored by Ali Smith in her short story The Child - a story for adults - in which a woman finds a racist, sexist baby in her shopping trolley and is obliged to take him home because no one else will have him. This category of stories are as much about parenthood as they are about childhood, and so speak to a dual audience. The adult can’t tell the difference between a tiny tot and a beast. In this way, the child is depicted as a little monster in the house. The mother responds as ever, ‘Not now, Bernard’. The monster explains himself by saying ‘I’m a monster’. The purple monster then takes Bernard’s place in the house, causing mayhem. Bernard tells his mother there’s a monster in the garden and it’s going to eat him, but the adults turn a deaf ear.

Thus, these characters are proto-superhero characters in their own way.Īnother example is Not Now, Bernard by Robert McKee, published in 1980. It’s therefore up to Courage to save the day - a take on the superhero story and the lone hero for a younger audience. The 1990s gave us the cartoon series Courage the Cowardly Dog, which uses this trope over and over, as part of the structure of every episode: Courage sees a baddie, but Muriel (who is short-sighted) and Eustace (who is unkind) never take him seriously. The Lion And The Mouse Story With Moral Lesson And SummaryĬhild characters whose warnings are ignored by adults - even in the midst of clear and present danger - are stock fodder and perennial favourites in children’s stories.

A Lion in the Meadow by Margaret Mahy