‘The Treasure Box’ opens with the line, ‘When the enemy bombed the library, everything burned’. Bits of paper imprinted with words from books, fall from the sky. This is a story about the impact of war on individuals and families.
The illustrations reveal a decimated cityscape. The story profiles a father and his son, Peter. A single book has survived—the father’s book, borrowed from the library to study people. The father describes it as ‘rarer than rubies, more splendid than silver, greater than gold’. He and his son carry the wrapped book as they join the long queue of refugees.
Peter’s father extracts a promise from his son to ‘keep our treasure safe’. As the box is too heavy to carry across the mountains, Peter buries it, safe from bombs and fire. He settles in a new country, but never forgets the treasure. One day he returns to its burial place where a young girl is playing. He tells her about the treasure box buried under the linden tree. The young girl is surprised that the treasure is ‘only a book’. In a memorable ending, Peter returns the book to the rebuilt library where it can be ‘read and loved’.
Freya Blackwood’s pencil and watercolour illustrations are a mixture of painted backgrounds with collage and paper cut outs. She describes how she created ‘each illustration in layers, cut out and stuck one upon the other like a paper diorama’. Her initial grey, browns, blues and ochre backgrounds reflect war’s devastation. Only the precious book is a brilliant red. When Peter returns to the village to retrieve his treasure, Blackwood fills her illustrations with orange, red, and green colours to convey a renewal of life in a rebuilt town.
When the bombs destroyed the library, the air was littered with paper collage in several illustrations and the endpapers representing the destruction of people’s stories. The collage of words feature translations of three Australian novels: ‘The Silver Donkey’ by Sonya Hartnett and Morris Gleitzman’s ‘Once’ and ‘Then’. These memorable novels for younger readers are about war’s impact. ‘The Treasure Box’ offers a simple but deep story about the importance of stories to sustain people.
Picture Books for Older Readers
