Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China

Ed Young won the Caldecott Medal for Lon Po Po in 1990, and the book has been in print continuously ever since. It deserves the staying power. The tale itself — older than the European Red Riding Hood by several centuries, and considerably odder — concerns three sisters left at home while their mother goes to visit their actual grandmother. A wolf shows up at the door claiming to be that grandmother. The eldest sister, Shang, figures out the deception. The rest of the story is the three girls working out how to get the wolf out of the house.

What sets the book apart visually is Young’s panel work. He paints in ink, watercolour, and pastel on what looks like silk, and he breaks every spread into vertical panels — sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes one full-bleed. The effect is the closest a Western picture book has come to the hand-scroll tradition of Chinese landscape painting. The wolf is rendered almost entirely in suggestion: a yellow eye, a paw, the curve of a back. He is more frightening for being half-glimpsed than he would be if drawn whole.

The text is sparse. Young is a sparse writer when he writes at all (he often illustrates other people’s words). The girls’ cleverness is shown in dialogue and the wolf’s downfall is told in a single calm paragraph. The book trusts the reader.

This belongs on the Library list because it is the strongest single Chinese- folklore picture book in English, and because the tradition the story comes from — strong-willed children outwitting a supernatural threat — sits naturally alongside the Daoist sensibility of The Empty Pot and the Stonecutter. It is not a Daoist text, but it shares a worldview: the world is strange, the rules of safety are not as obvious as adults pretend, and a child who pays attention can save herself.

A note for parents: this is the book on the list most likely to occasion a request to read it again immediately. Both children and adults seem to want a second pass to look at the paintings properly.