Years ago, a teaching mentor of mine told me that the sure sign of an excellent student paper is that the reader finds himself telling someone else about it. I have found that this goes for books as well, and not just for academic books or novels, but for really any truly intriguing book or article that happens to come my way.
The most recent book to illustrate the accuracy of this test in my world is David Lyle Jeffrey’s Tales From Limerick Forest, a book that straddles genres and audiences but absolutely provokes admiration and conversation. In this case, the book passed the conversation test when, after having driven multiple, grueling hours with the family in order to visit relatives in New England earlier this month, quite soon after arrival I found myself regaling my patient brother-in-law with commentary about Dolly the partridge, fermented apples, and a chipmunk who lost his pants–that is, about Limerick Forest. Before long, I had pulled out the book itself–which I had brought as my younger children’s current read-aloud–and soon found myself underneath a pile of nieces and nephews who also wanted to join in on the reading.
In his foreword to the book, Joseph Pearce places Limerick Forest among fairy tales, fantasies, and fables, which is of course appropriate. There’s the aforementioned Dolly, who glories in the early, pants-related misfortune of Charlie the chipmunk but then benefits from Charlie’s forbearance when she gets into trouble herself; Dolly and Charlie’s story threads can certainly be called morality tales. And Prickly Porcupine, the only character to appear in every chapter, wraps up each story with a moral limerick or poem that clearly calls Aesop’s fables to mind. The various characters are also whimsical and cleverly named and described, as they usually are in children’s animal stories. Several characters serve to introduce child readers to other cultures and ways of speaking (the Scottish raccoons and the Greenlandic owl) and to amuse adult ones. In a similar vein, the “bard” owl and singer otters make enjoyable references to recognizable real-world music and poetry.
But there’s also something particular, something a little more unusual, about David Lyle Jeffrey’s tales of the animals of this particular forest. While many of the stories’ elements point toward ordinary Christian morals or just little bits of fun, much like many popular but perhaps not very remarkable Christian children’s stories, the most interesting thing about Limerick Forest is that its animals are concerned with identifying principles of natural law. This clever conceit is the real heart of the book: the stories are meant to amuse and delight, of course, but the book also means to introduce readers to natural law, providing new parables through which children and adults can contemplate connections between the natural world and moral behavior.
For there are rules in Limerick Forest, and the animals there conclude that codifying these rules into laws is necessary in order to protect the weak without weakening the strong. Some of these laws are simple: as Charlie the chipmunk learns, for example, the first rule of the forest is to always do what your mother says (or you might lose your pants to a bird of prey–or worse, be eaten). This establishes the idea of a natural hierarchy of authority that, of course, parallels real-world parental authority. This particular story reminds me of Beatrix Potter’s tales, in particular The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit, whose protagonist’s tail gets shot off because he’s mean to a good, obedient bunny, or the better-known Tale of Peter Rabbit, in which Peter’s disobedience to his mother almost gets him caught and baked into a pie.
But some rules are more challenging for the animals to figure out. After a wolf attacks a fawn and the fawn’s father fights him off, for example, the animals gather to discuss: Is it acceptable to eat babies? The heron argues that it is, as he relies on minnows for much of his nutrition. But the fawn, naturally, does not want to be eaten–nor do the other herbivores, nor the smaller creatures generally. Yet these do have to accept that carnivores must eat meat in order to survive. But must they eat babies? A careful discussion ensues, with an eventual appeal to the owls of the local legal firm, Binthar and Dunnit.
Such dilemmas large and small, intermixed with limericks and songs and gorgeous artwork by illustrator Megan Major, form a fascinating basis for demonstrating that many of the rules of Christian morality are also written into the rules of nature. Some of the chapters, poetry, and characters do this better than others (and I do also wish that the printing could have been done on higher-quality paper, which would have better served the beautiful illustrations). But overall the stories are very effective. For example, Jeffrey drives the point home in a lovely winter chapter in which the animals witness humans holding a Christmas church service. Daisy Deer and Bouncy the bunny and, of course, Prickly Porcupine do not quite understand what is happening among the humans, but they do understand that the ethereal aurora borealis that lights up the sky later that night has some connection to what they have just witnessed at the “people-creature” church. (The illustration accompanying this scene is also one of the most striking in the entire book.) The awe-filled stillness of the story here captures the awe-filled stillness of the mystery of Christ’s birth; it perfectly emphasizes Christ as the fulfillment of the laws of God and nature.
Hence this book is something special: a new set of Christian fables on natural law that do more than teach simple morals or seek to modify children’s behavior. Jeffrey’s animals indicate to readers that morals are not just top-down impositions but bottom-up discoveries that are written in the design of the world and of human (or in this case, animal) nature. This is something important that many modern children’s stories ignore. Children see right through blatant moralizing or unrelatable moral resolutions; but give them a sense of complexity and of whence right and wrong actually come, and they will be instantly intrigued.
It will not be a surprise to hear, then, that in the end I had to promise to send my five-year-old nephew his own copy of Limerick Forest in the mail before I could claw my review copy back from his surprisingly strong little hands. Knowing that he was not the sort of child who would forget such a promise, ordering the book for him was one of the first tasks I completed after our return home to Virginia later that week. As far as I am concerned, it was money well spent.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
