What to Read to Your Kids

In the past seven months, many of us have learned to move with a new heaviness in our body. It’s the extra weight of uncertainty and anxiety, of mask wearing and hyper-vigilance. We may not be able to see it, but it’s there. We find evidence of it in the new depression in our sofa cushions. We find evidence of it in our interrupted sleep patterns, our bizarre dreams, or the way we take an extra day or ten to return emails.

Our kids feel it, too, even when they’re not slogging through school on screens. How many of us have struggled to push our kids out the door—Go ride your bike!—only to be met with resistance: I’m too tired! These babes of yore, previously so quick to bound out the door, to reach for their friends’ hands, to tear down a soccer field, are grappling with their own heaviness from a life disrupted.

Perhaps this is why it’s easy to feel a kinship with the star of the new picture book, The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, by Canadian team Riel Nason and Byron Eggenschwiler, about a young ghost who envies the weightlessness of ghosts who float easily through the world like the sheets they are. Our ghost is a quilt, and quilts are infinitely heavier than sheets. And when you’re supposed to do ghost-like things but you’re born a quilt—well, it’s easy to feel a little down and out.

It has been a long time since I’ve been excited about a new Halloween book. Let’s be honest: it’s hard to compete with the likes of Creepy Carrots, The Monsters’ Monster, or Ten Orange Pumpkins—and don’t even get me started on my love for the early reader, In a Dark, Dark Room, or my dog-eared, cherished-above-all copy of The Blue-Nosed Witch. But from the moment I opened The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, with its moody pencil illustrations rendered in a limited palette, I had another favorite. That it feels more than perfect for this particular Halloween is just a bonus.