The ending shows the boy, now grown into a man, hugging his father for the first time in years. Now, obviously the book is primarily about incarcerated parents. What Knock Knock is telling us is that even if they’re not there, you can grow up and become the man or woman you were meant to be. Lots of kids have one parent or another disappear on them. The key to Knock Knock lies in the fact that Beaty’s tale is about an absent parent and not necessarily an incarcerated one. Whether it’s for what she believes to be his own good or because she can’t bring herself to explain, there’s a reality at work here.īut the explanation that rings truest to me is this If the boy doesn’t know then it opens wide the possible applications of this book. Second, if the kid isn’t willfully ignoring the evidence at hand, it’s just as possible that his mother isn’t telling him. This might be one of those rare picture book unreliable narrators we come across from time to time. It is all too easy to believe that the kid has been told where his father is and he simply cannot process the information. For that very reason, you have reason to question the narrative. First and foremost, remember that you are getting this tale through the eyes of a child. Shouldn’t a kid be told? To this I have a couple answers. One day he’s there and the next he’s gone. As he puts it, “This experience prompted me to tell the story of this loss from a child’s perspective and also to offer hope that every fatherless child can still create the most beautiful life possible.”Īs you might imagine, I vetted this one with some of my fellow children’s librarians and one concern that arose stemmed from the fact that the boy isn’t told what happened to his father. In his Author’s Note, Daniel Beaty discusses the effect his own father’s incarceration had on him when he was only three. “Knock Knock with the knowledge that you are my son and you have a bright, beautiful future.” Years later when the boy has grown, his father returns to him. It then proceeds to encourage the boy to seek his own path and grow to manhood without him. “I am sorry I will not be coming home,” it begins. Then, one day, there’s a letter from his father sitting on the desk. He tells his dad that he was hoping that when he got older he’d teach him how to dribble a ball or shave or drive or fix a car even. Bewildered and lost, the boy writes his father a letter and leaves it on his desk in the desperate hope that maybe his dad’s in the apartment when the boy’s not home. The man is simply gone, poof! Like he was never there at all. That is, until the day his father didn’t knock anymore. Then he’d “surprise” his father by leaping into his arms once he came in the room. The boy would pretend to be sleeping when his father went “Knock Knock” on the door. So though I’m sure kids that find themselves exactly in the protagonist’s shoes will get something out of this book, they are not the only ones. It’s one of the very few picture books to talk about the process of growing into adulthood. It can be used with any child missing a parent, for whatever reason. So while Daniel Beaty’s Knock Knock: My Dad’s Dream for Me is ostensibly about a child with an incarcerated father, to my mind this is a book that has far reaching applications. Windows where they can see how other children live. The ideal use of picture books, on some level, is to provide windows and mirrors for the kiddos. Black, obviously (if I'm feeling snarky I’ll then follow up their request with Precious and the Boo Hag or something equally black AND rural). Of course we all know what “urban” is code for. urban?” And this in the heart of New York City no less. I’ve complained about this before but there is nothing more disturbing to me than when a children’s librarian shows a parent a perfectly lovely book only to be asked, “Do you have anything a little less. There is a perception out there amongst certain types of parents that the only picture books worthy of their little geniuses are those that reflect their own lives perfectly.
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