Simon and His Boxes

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

John Keats would have rejected this book—at least, he would have if he
sincerely meant his remark that we reject all poetry that has a
conscious design upon us. Simon and His Boxes has a design that is not
merely conscious: it is blatant. (Whatever its faults, subtlety is not
one of them.) This is the story, very simply told, of a little boy who
builds animal houses out of discarded boxes—only to discover that
animals will not live in them. (Even the Green movement has its bкtes
noires.) Rather than abandon his ideological convictions, he inveighs
his friends, bi-ped as well as quadru-ped, into using the boxes for a
forest-wide trash pickup.

The story line is, to put it kindly, somewhat unsophisticated. Good
politics do not, alas, necessarily make for good literature. But young
children are sturdy creatures, and have the advantage of not having read
Keats. They would probably enjoy the book, oh-so-politically-correct
moral and all. (As all parents can testify, kids are able to swallow the
most amazing things.) And the illustrations are a real treat: colorful,
whimsical, and visually clever, they are far and away the best thing
about this doctrinaire little book.