The story is simple. A girl runs away and comes upon a big house in the woods. A skull lives there and he gives her a tour. Impressive place. A little dingy. We're not so sure about the wall of spooky masks or the dungeon with the bottomless pit, but the skull is kind and maybe a little lonely and so is the girl, whose name is Ottilla, and this is all that's required for a friendship to start forming.
There is a problem. Every night, a headless skeleton comes chasing after the skull, who does not want to be caught. There is a resolution, based on a satisfyingly violent plan cooked up by Ottilla that night, and a sweet epilogue over breakfast the following morning.
There are also, of course, values, which I've had ample time to consider in the approximately 200 times I've read Jon Klassen's The Skull to my 2-year-old daughter. They are as follows: courage, friendship, acceptance. The back covers of children's books often spell these out to reassure parents that their kids are receiving some kind of instruction in how to be a good person.
As is the case with many folktales, one of the great strengths of The Skull is its elliptical nature. We never learn why Ottilla is running away or what she's running away from, or why the skull is so desperate to escape the clutches of the headless skeleton, or why the skull seems unbothered about being a skull and, presumably, dead.
In an author's note, Klassen says that he was inspired by an old Tyrolean story he once read in a collection of folktales. Years later, as he thought about writing his own take, he revisited the original folktale and realized that the book he had in mind differed in many key respects. His version was weirder and better, and it's what we get in The Skull: a folktale retold, changed by whatever strange synthesis happens when somebody unwittingly imagines new details for an old story.
Perhaps this trick of memory and tradition, along with Klassen's typically terse deadpan (see his Hat Trilogy) and the deep shadows haunting his artwork, helps contribute to The Skull's sense of unknowability. There are deep silences in this book, questions that have to go unanswered. It's also pretty funny.
My daughter loves The Skull. So do I, which is not something I can say about all of the books she loves. (God save me from Curious George.) My admiration for The Skull seems to be shared by many parents for all the reasons above as well as a particular appreciation for the fact that there's no real obvious "moral of the story." Values, sure, including the ones that are more or less clearly stated and those that are implied: The world is a weird and funny place, our motivations are murky, memory is fickle. What's important is that the book isn't didactic, or trying to sell you anything.
As my daughter's library grows, I've learned the heavy-handed "moral of the story" cliche isn't actually all that pronounced in children's literature — with the exception of those books about learning how to poop in the potty, when heavy-handed obvious lessons are really what you want. Nursery rhymes and folktales, especially, traffic in powerful ambiguity. I couldn't tell you what practical lesson is contained in "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," but the line "I don't know why she swallowed a fly — perhaps she'll die!" hits like something from Emily Dickinson.
Regardless, I don't blame any parent for being suspicious of the explicit or implied messages in the media their children take in. This anxiety may be especially acute in a world with smartphones and social media, where we no longer have to play the record backward to hear the satanic message. I have seen the devil's face, and he is on CoComelon.
The sight of a child staring glazed-eyed at an iPad fills us with dread because we know exactly what it feels like to stare at our own screens for 12 hours a day. We know that something happens to us when we do this, and we know that it is very hard to turn off. Whatever positive moral lessons are embedded in all those YouTube videos and Instagram reels and New York Times articles are undergirded by the imperative to keep scrolling, to fill every moment with some stimulus.
The moral of this particular story is, I think, more complicated than phones are bad, books are good. Long before smartphones, parents worried about the many ways the world will screw their kids up. You might do everything right and the wrong book, the wrong movie, the wrong teacher, the wrong friend at school, will still point them toward a life of dissolution. Philip Larkin had a point in noting that mom and dad do plenty of accidental damage on their own, anyway. We still do our best.
When I read The Skull with my daughter, though, I find myself thrilling to its shadows, all their unspoken secrets, more than I do the bits about friendship and bravery. The world is a weird and amazing place. If, in a silent moment, our children can occasionally stop and wonder at this, then we may have done OK as parents.