Realistic Fiction Picture Book: The Village Garage

Title: The Village Garage
Author: G. Brian Karas
Publication: 2010

The Village Garage is about a team of workers who clean the streets, patch holes and fix the pipes of the town. They work through all four seasons, no matter the weather. Karas does a great job of using the seasons in the book as a lesson for kids. He pairs each season with what needs to be "cleaned up" at that time. For example, in autumn, they pick up leaves and in winter they shovel snow. I believe this is an effective way to teach seasons and pair mental pictures of what occurs during those seasons, so kids know what is associated with each.

Personally, I picked up this book because of the boys and big yellow truck on the cover. I noticed that a lot of the books I've been picking up have females as the protagonist. I don't think I was purposely doing it, but I seem to connect and relate to the characters and story line more. So I wanted to do more books that may identify more with males or boys. Just by flipping through the pages and looking at the cover I could tell the book had a more male driven voice. It was in fact written by a guy as well. All of the pictures also mainly include men, which I found to be very representative of our gender-centric society. We tend to put male and female into two boxes. Women can be teachers. Men are construction workers. While some of these may be somewhat true, we should see gender roles as being more fluid instead of stable. Women can work and be a mother. Men can cook, do laundry, chauffeur children to soccer practice and work. Or men can stay at home while the mom works. Whatever it is that person wants to do...they can and should be able to.

I believe this book does reinforce strict gender roles, in that males should be the ones liking construction work and those types of books. However, I also think this book does a good job of making it interesting for both males and females. Because Karas added the element of the seasons along with the construction work, I as a woman was interested. However, I don't think this book is a gender-neutral as say Quest, a wordless picture book that has both a male and female as the main characters. Conversely, there are very female driven books like, Pinkalicious or Fancy Nancy. In literature, we should see gender on more of a spectrum than in two boxes, male and female. There is a large array of books, from girly to gender-neutral to boyish, that kids of all genders can enjoy.