Can You Keep a Secret? by Melissa Castrillon
There comes a time when a child realises she knows something, maybe lots, that her parents don’t. Their paths become distinct from one another. Here, with pictures like chalky lithographs and with creatures a little reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s wild things, Melissa Castillon guides us and Winnie through storms to build a bridge between the mundane world of parents and the wild world of forest and mountain. In doing so she has created an allegory of how a child comes to understand a past before she was born and how she might accommodate it in her consciousness.
Parents know they are to look after their children. They don’t always know how their children look after them.
