Children’s spaces in pages: Examining spatiality in COVID-19-themed children’s books

Abstract

This article examines spatiality in selected children’s books about COVID-19. Spatiality is an important lens because the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis related to distancing and mobility restrictions—spatial matters. Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities was adopted as a framework to how children’s books present community belongingness within the spatial restrictions imposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a content analysis of pandemic-related children’s books published in early 2020 (n = 51), this paper explores the sense of community in three everyday spaces: ‘inside’ (home), ‘outside’ (outdoors), and ‘in-betweens’ (windows and digital space). Findings reveal a two-fold observation: (1) children’s books show how the ‘normal’ in everyday space is disrupted; and (2) layers of imagined communities manifest within the everyday spaces depicted in the books examined. These findings offer insights that while children’s literature and geography are different disciplines, there is much to be explored about spaces in children’s lives from writers and illustrators of children’s books. Likewise, a geographical lens can substantiate discussions in children’s literature by unpacking relationships of characters based on the spaces they occupy. With these in mind, it is hoped that conversations about spatial discourses in children’s books flourish from this initial exploration.

Introduction

This paper examines children’s books about the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of spatiality. The context of this effort is an interdisciplinary orientation whereby books are used as an entry-point for the meeting of two ‘practices of space’—literature and geography (Peraldo, 2016). What does spatiality offer to literary analysis, and likewise, what value does literature bring to geography? Drawing from Robert Frost’s insight that ‘all literature begins with geography’ (cited in Rath, 2003: 319), to take a spatial perspective in examining literature is to pay closer attention to the spaces that terriorialise, expand, and mediate the world inside literary works. This is to practise what Tsing (2012) calls the ‘art of noticing’¹ (See also Thiel, 2020)—noticing how space connects to its occupants in many ways, from the meaning makings, to embedded memories, to the relationships formed within spaces.

As the world faced the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, various authors and organisations uploaded free digital copies of children’s books related to coronavirus to educate and/or support young children about COVID-19, and help parents/guardians and teachers explain the pandemic to children (Sarles, 2020a). Such books illustrate how children and their families adjust during the pandemic lockdown, addressing ‘big feelings like anxiety, boredom, worry, and fear as well as issues such as kindness, love, compassion, gratitude, and staying positive, safe, and healthy’ (Sarles, 2020b: 5). In particular, spatiality in books about COVID-19 is an important analytical angle because the pandemic is a spatial experience as much as it is a health concern. Spatiality’s relevance transpires from the pandemic-induced changes in children’s everyday spaces, such as social distancing, staying home, and restricted outdoor activities (Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020; Shields et al., 2020). Lockdowns and distancing protocols have mediated the mobilities and familiar spatial patterns for children, inciting new ways to think about distance, intimacy, and spatial relationships. As such, attention to spatiality in children’s books contributes to deeper appreciation that while our lives are different, we are also similarly spatially troubled by the pandemic. Coloured by different writing perspectives—from children characters, to doctors, to an oyster, to birds, to the coronavirus itself—children’s books are analysed to offer a glimpse of the pandemic as a spatial matter in children’s books.

The contribution of this piece is two-fold, depending on whose eyes read this piece. While children’s literature and geography are different disciplines—although their points of entanglement can be fruitfully unpacked—there is much to be learned about spaces in children’s lives from the way authors and illustrators of children’s books depict spaces. Likewise, a geographical lens in examining children’s literature can offer alternative perspectives to literary scholars from ‘noticing’ unarticulated folds of spatialities in children’s books.

Literature review

Studies on children’s literature about crises and public health centre on, but not exclusively, three main themes—bodies (Montreuil and Carnevale, 2016; Moruzi et al., 2022), consequences (Connolly, 2008), and political issues (e.g. #EmpowerTheReader) (Johnson et al., 2018; Xeni, 2020). The body is a salient theme amongst children’s literature on public health, with emphasis on health-related messages for children to ‘take their own health seriously, in response to changes in societal ideas and attitudes about the inspection and interrogation of the child’s body’ (Moruzi et al., 2022: 109). Studies on crisis-related consequences include examining how books portray illnesses (Conrad et al., 2020) and death (Arruda-Colli et al., 2017), extending to discussions about children’s mental health and well-being (Cox and Brewster, 2020; Fraser-Arnott, 2020), to bibliotherapy in helping children communicate their feelings through books (Sarles, 2020). Finally, scholarly works also address political issues during the pandemic such as digital inequality in access to children’s books (Smith, 2020), inequalities in adapting to online children’s literature (Pecenkovic and Kodric, 2021), and less reading time for children (Massey et al., 2021). A common theme is re-imagining health practices (Smith, 2018) and sparking hope to children amidst the pandemic (Massey et al., 2021).

The above-mentioned literature reflects children’s books as learning tools and prompts for conversation. However, inspired by studies that encourage a geographical view to the art of reading (See Keighren, 2006; Livingstone, 2005; Hones, 2008), this analysis shifts attention to children’s books as entry-points to discuss spaces as this receives little attention in the literature, not least the trivial spaces (See discussion in Theoretical Framework). Studies looking at the crossroads of literature and geography typically include grand spatialities found in adventure stories (Hones and Endo, 2006), world-building (Kitchin and Kneale, 2002; Kneale, 2006), ‘place-defining’ novels (Shortridge, 1991), or introduction to geography and regions (Brooker-Gross, 1981; Gesler, 2004). However, the COVID-19 pandemic context calls for attention to everyday spaces because it is a crisis related to distance and mobility—spatial matters. To address this critical angle, it is important to highlight the rather prosaic spaces in children’s books, such as home and streets, and how these are portrayed within the broader discussion of a global pandemic.

Theoretical framework

It is important to juxtapose spatiality to the notion of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), referring to the formation of communities through imagining a shared connection by members of a given group. While Anderson wrote his argument with nation-building in mind, this article adopts the practice of imagination to stress that humans bond with each other through mutually imagining a community. In particular, the focus is on trivial spaces or everyday spaces, such as home and neighbourhood, depicted in children’s books. Why draw on trivial spaces or everyday spaces to examine the sense of community? The answer is both practical and theoretical. Firstly, trivial spaces only trigger interest when threatened in some way. The pandemic restrictions threatened the stability of the very spaces that bound young readers, unfolding how familiar spaces are a big part of spatial relations within a global health crisis. Secondly, trivial spaces constitute spatial rootedness (Agnew et al., 2014) whereby occupying everyday spaces is enmeshed with many different connections and interactions—larger community (social landscape), intimate relationships (emotional landscape), idea formation (intellectual landscape), and time periods (temporal landscape), among others (Pocock, 2014). These interactions from spatial rooteness aid in disentangling imagined communities as members interact within the restrictions of their locked down everyday spaces. Space is seen as a host of multiple networks of belongingness, underlining the everyday familiar spaces and how these spaces allow members to imagine communities. As mentioned in the introduction, this necessitates practising the ‘art of noticing’ to make sense of how children’s books depict mundane and taken-for-granted spaces.

This article builds on studies that centre on the spatialities of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ during the pandemic—staying home (inside) was mandatory and going elsewhere (outside) was restricted, dramatically changing mobilities and spatial relations (Byrne, 2020). The inside or domestic premises became an ‘intense site of practically everything’ (Fullagar and Pavlidis, 2020: 155) while the outside, such as neighbourhood, streets, and shops, imposed new proximity and distance protocols (Mehta, 2020; Russell and Stenning, 2020). However, the inside and outside as spaces need further unpacking as their complex dynamics became more apparent during lockdowns when the meanings of boundaries, mobilities, and encounters with spatial environments kept changing (Thorpe et al., 2021). In this regard, the concept of imagined communities is an important point of reference in how inside and outside communities lose stability, (re)emerged, or remained. Examining inside-outside spatialities in children’s books extends our understanding of the fixed and fluid characteristics of imagined communities, appreciating the spaces that govern community building. Attention to trivial spatialities helps deconstruct the binary categories during the pandemic such as inside-outside lockdowns to show greater sensitivity to complex spatial relations during the pandemic.

Methodology

A content analysis of COVID-19 pandemic-related children’s books (n = 51) was implemented, which included picture books and illustrated books downloadable for free online based on Patricia Sarles’ (2020a) article titled: ‘Pandemic Publishing: A Selected COVID-19 Bibliography’ in the journal Children & Libraries published in 2020. Sarles listed 50 children’s books about COVID-19 available online as of 7 May 2020. In this study, however, five books were excluded from the analysis because they are either not available for free anymore or not relevant in the analysis (See Appendix). There were also six books added in the analysis that were not in Sarles’ original list. The inclusion of these books was a result of the author’s further cursory search, combining the keywords: ‘children’, ‘books’, ‘visual illustration’, ‘COVID-19’, ‘coronavirus’, and ‘pandemic’ as search inquiries on web browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. In total, there are 51 books included in the analysis. Limitations of this analysis include (1) no information information regarding children’s reception, interpretation, and actual behaviour in reading these books; (2) only books written in English or with English versions were selected in the analysis, thus the materials in themselves are limited by language selection; (3) As Sarles (2020a) notes, the quality of books in her list varies, as many are self-published. It is to be noted further that many of these books are unpaged, hence the quotes in the findings section are without page numbers.

Following the theoretical framework on the inside-outside spatialities of imagined communities, initial codes were generated deductively (Crabtree and Miller, 1999). The deductive model was employed to make the analysis coherent to the overarching theoretical framework (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006; Boyatzis, 1998) of ‘noticing’ belongingness with trivial spaces in children’s books. This involved three spatial categories—inside (home), outside (outdoors), and in-between spaces (windows and digital space)—in the codebook as themes to organise subsequent analysis. These categories are not mutually exclusive, whereby books can portray multiple spatialities. A preliminary scanning of the books in the sample was also conducted to test whether these themes are clearly present.

Note that while some of the authors call their creative works ‘picture books’, the books in the sample may not satisfy the technical definition of a picture book, in which young readers connect images and words to comprehend the message and full story of the book (See Hall et al., 2015). As such, all materials for examination are referred to as ‘children’s books’ to have a more encompassing description of the sample. For the purposes of discussion, the term ‘children’s books’ loosely refers to the books claimed by the authors to be written for children readers. It is also important to note that books under examination are a part of the ‘digital surge’ (‘De et al., 2020) during the early waves of COVID-10 pandemic, which prompted increased use of information systems and electronically mediated literary technologies for education including children’s books (Hu et al., 2021). The digital nature of the books examined in this analysis makes them easily accessible to those with digital devices. While the question on the extent technology can enrich children’s learning positively still lingers (Bus et al., 2020), adopting literacy technologies offer different experiences compared to paper books in terms on shared reading with adults (Rvachew et al., 2017), emotional design (Münchow and Bannert, 2019), children’s reading and writing ability (Ihmeideh, 2014), and early literacy (McGlynn-Stewart et al., 2019).

Of the examined books, 38 were written individually, while 13 were co-authored. There were 22 books translated into other languages. A total of 12 books contain dominantly mono-racial characters, usually with White, Black, or Asian-Pacific Islander characters, and one book with Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, while 16 books comprise multi-racial characters. Interestingly, 12 books have main non-human characters such as animals, plants, and the coronavirus itself, while 3 books have non-Earthling fictional characters. There are also 8 books with characters whose descent of ethnicity or species is ambiguous or cannot be determined at all because there was no mention of the setting in which the story takes place. Finally, 33 books have read-along videos on Youtube, with four read by celebrities including Jon Burgerman, Howard Donald, Natalie Portman, and Donald Sutherland.

Findings: Spatiality and children’s pandemic experiences

The books analysed in this work highlight the inevitable changes inside home, the outdoors, and in-between spaces such as the window and digital spaces. Here, attending to spatial entanglements also underscores depictions of concrete boundaries yet blurred spaces wherein book characters navigate. Whereas spatial boundaries are clearly established, the search for meaningful connection resumes elsewhere, such as the digital space and the case of windows.

The inside: Duties, activities, and relationships at home

Home as a domestic sanctuary is crucial in understanding the spatial context of the pandemic. All 51 books allude to home as a place of safety, with illustrations of houses from the inside (See Figure 1) and outside (See Figure 2) vantage points and 33 books specifically focus on staying at home and hygiene protocols. Staying at home is also presented as an event beyond individual-level decision making, with forced adjustments that apply to almost everyone. For instance, the book Piggy and Bunny and the Stay-at-home Plan depicts being told to stay home: ‘But something is different and now kids are all home’ and ‘it’s tiring to stay home and do what you’re told!’ (Belgum, 2020). Likewise, phrases such as ‘people had to be asked to stay home’ (Cavallo, 2020) and ‘The politicians want to keep you safe so you should do what they say which means staying at home’ (Tedder, 2020) point out to decisions made by leaders. In the book Community Safety Plan (Drulis, 2020), home is presented as a safe space compared to outdoors, with children rationalising staying home as an explorative adventure: ‘It’s okay that parks are closed for now, I can go on a walk or find outdoor places to explore close to my house’. Children are also shown to have the capacity to be flexible and resilient in sharing the limited home spaces they have at their disposal. For instance, children are depicted as able to negotiate, adjust, and compromise a common space with their grown-ups to do adult work. In particular, the books depict how children adjust to the boundaries and restrictions when it comes to what children can do, especially when their parents work. The book Can We Play Now? (Polsky, 2020) presents children’s sensitivity in adjusting their noise production in the shared space with their grown-ups: ‘Sometimes I have to be extra quiet while they do their work. That is not so easy’. The book Be a Coronavirus Fighter (Daemicke and Wu, 2020) shows children with capes like superheroes, underscoring the precedence of being responsible and following rules before personal desires of going out: ‘With this virus, it is best to stay at home rather than go out and play with your friends or go to a birth party.’ How Not to Go to School (Forde, 2020) talks about children’s feeling of being restricted, showing dancing children with their mother, with the text: ‘...when we’re all stuck inside together, everyone starts to go a bit crazy’. My Hero is You (United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2020) presents staying home as a pleasant event, depicting smiles among family members sharing home space together, along with words like: ‘Go, tell your families, we are safer inside! We can take care of each other best by staying home.’

Figure 1.

A message from corona (Tedder, 2020).

Figure 2.

Mission: Stay home (Dalmaus, 2020).

Moreover, books paying attention to home recognise the potentially unpleasant situation that children might feel in staying home all day but at the same time touch upon the notions of collectivity and comfort amidst the pandemic. For instance, ‘being stuck inside can be lonely, and the virus is scary’ is followed by ‘we’re all in this together though’ (Griffiths, 2020). Other cases that describe staying home include ‘tough’ but ‘it’s okay to feel grumpy or tired’ (Borst, 2020), ‘tiring’ but ‘it’ll be okay’ (Belgum, 2020), ‘sad and scary’ but ‘there are lots of fun things that you can do at home too’ (Tedder, 2020) and ‘stinks’ but ‘remember to be caring and brave’ (McGaw, 2020). Likewise, in the book Coronavirus: A Book for Children (Jenner, Wilson and Roberts, 2020), children are shown playing alone, staring at the window, or crying, with callout monologues such as: ‘Sometimes I miss my friends. Sometimes I feel angry. Sometimes I feel sad’, which is followed by depictions of adults and animals feeling the same way, with the text: ‘...everyone who lives with you probably feels the same way sometimes, even if they try not to show it’.

There are 24 books that provide detailed narration of activities at home as a space with overlapping activities in the household, depicting family members doing different tasks in a shared space. For example, in the book Staying Home, family members are shown doing specific tasks, in which ‘Daddy does some work on his computer. Mummy takes Emily, Harry and Charlie out on their scooters’ (Nicholls, 2020). There are also strategies to enjoy spending time in a limited space such as ‘I will be focused on learning and playing and my adults might need to spend time working’ in Be a Coronavirus Fighter (Daemicke and Wu, 2020) or ‘Even when I feel bored from being home all the time, I can always make new fun with my toys, my imagination, and my family’ in Community Safety Plan (Drulis, 2020).

Related to home activities are relationships at home. In 18 books, home is represented as a place of shared feelings where children can ‘always tell [their] grown-ups how [they are] feeling’ (Drulis, 2020), suggesting that children ‘should tell the grown-ups how [they] feel, and be kind to each other’ (Griffiths, 2020). As a shared space, home is also characterised as a space for children’s discoveries about other members of the family. For instance, there are depictions of children interpreting adult life from observing their parents in work-from-home mode, with words like: ‘Shame, the poor adults, they’re trying to work from home. Typing and having meetings... now that’s really boring’ (Griffiths, 2020). An overlapping theme to such discoveries is having inevitable conflicts with others. This is portrayed in characters having conflict with each other, such as complaining about noise: ‘There are days when we are all together all day long. Sometimes that feels like too much for me’ (Polsky, 2020); or fighting for toys: ‘Emily is cross because Harry isn’t sharing. “It’s my turn!” she says. “I’m not finished!” says Harry. Emily tries to snatch the computer. Harry starts to cry’ (Nicholls, 2020). Meanwhile, the book Even Superheroes Stay Home (McGaw, 2020) illustrates children’s monologue on understanding their parents’ needs: ‘And when mom needs a break . . . . She’ll need help to escape.’ Meanwhile, My New Home School (Drulis, 2020) demonstrates children’s independence, respect, and willingness to wait for their grown-ups to finish their activities: ‘I am still going to have dinner and special time to spend with my grown-ups’.

The outside: Global matter, restrictions, and hope

Beyond home, 37 among the selected books contextualise the pandemic within the global and neighbourhood scale. The COVID-19 pandemic is presented as a shared global health crisis,² highlighting the planet’s collective well-being. A new health crisis adds to the knowledge of children that viruses can cause serious health issues. There are 13 books that include illustrations of the planet Earth (See Figure 3). In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic as a shared new problem affects everyone on Earth as a shared space, connecting to personal lives, like having deaths of loved ones, job loss, or missing friends. This is visually represented in visualising gloomy moods, such as sad or bored faces, or crying people, for example. In Stephen’s (2020)What Color is Today, death is illustrated by showing an urn of a deceased relative, followed by the text: ‘She has gotten sick and COVID-19 seemed to stick’. Likewise, there were also illustrations of businesses shutting down as shown in closed doors or employees losing jobs: ‘...business is going away and so must all the workers they can’t afford to pay’. In Why We Stay Home (Harris and Scott, 2020), the issue of spreading the virus is depicted as something that takes place through mundane activities, showing children play, talk, and eat: ‘Germs are everywhere. They are on our bodies, chairs we sit on and even the door handle to your favorite ice cream parlor’ (See Figure 4). Similarly, in Griffiths’ (2020)The Inside Book, the pandemic has been shown as a shared issue that needs response at individual level such as depictions of children wearing masks and washing of hands: ‘Sometimes it travels from other people in tiny droplets through the air. That’s why some people wear masks. Sometimes it’s on the things we touch. That’s why we wash our hands often, with soap and water.’

Figure 3.

Everybody worries: A picture book for children who are worried about coronavirus (Burgerman, 2020).

Figure 4.

Why we stay home (Harris and Scott, 2020).

The focus on a global scale shares similar observations with home-focused books. The COVID-19 pandemic is a difficult spatial situation because of the awareness about how much one can infect others without proper distancing. But along with recognising unpleasant feelings, these sentiments are followed by reassurance that the readers do not experience the pandemic alone. For instance, the books Stuck Inside (Allman and Allman, 2020) and Careless Corny (Horne et al., 2020) present explicit statements of a shared experience such as ‘You are never home alone’ and ‘even if we’re in different places, we’re all in this together’, respectively. The Big Alone (Sisters Avendaño, 2020) also emphasises that distance is not an issue, portraying neighbourhoods comforting each other while staying home, noting that ‘You are not on your own in The Big Alone’ (See Figure 5). Such examples show shared frustrations wherein children can feel upset together with others outside their home.

Figure 5.

The big alone (The Sisters Avendaño, 2020).

On a neighbourhood scale, 25 books elaborate on the shared restrictions when dealing with the outdoor spaces. Yen’s (2020)Something Strange Happened in my City presents restrictions such as ‘I can’t go to school, the park, or my friend’s house to play. My parents can’t go to work. My grandma can’t go shopping. The street looks empty. I wonder where people are’ (Yen, 2020). These restrictions though are framed as duties, foregrounding alternative ways to express intimacy from a distance. The narrative on following outdoor distancing rules is heavily embedded, showing prescribed distance (1.5 metres) between characters. For instance, the book The Princess in Black and the Case of the Coronavirus presents a measurement called “frimplepants” (See Figure 6) to exactly indicate six feet or 1.5 meteres: ‘Make some space! Keep at least one frimplepants away from each other. One frimplepants = about six feet!’ (Hale and Hale, 2020). There are also 15 books that present alternative ways to communicate expressing one’s feelings and appreciating others consistently manifest in these 15 books through using metaphors to portray overcoming spatial and mobility restrictions, be it illustrating that ‘Love can travel through the thickest walls, over the highest mountains, under the deepest valleys’ (Ross, 2020) or that ‘love travels further than the virus’ (Rogers, 2020). Other examples include characters waving to each other from a distance, which go along with statements such as ‘They can’t get too close so they wave and shout “Hello!”’ (Nicholls, 2020) (See Figure 7) and ‘...you can give them a wave of even a shout’ (Watts, 2020). Similarly, in the book I Love You (Ross, 2020), a negotiation between a parent and a child illustrates a parent’s attempt to set distancing rules as a duty: ‘Well, we can go for a walk, just the two of us, as it’s not safe to be in a large group.’ Further to the theme of restrictions, The Spooky Shallow Cough (Rabb, 2020) demonstrates children heeding the words of adults: ‘From her [grandma] we’ll stay far far away. At least for now I’m told’. Some examples even extend to showing children as taking responsibility for animals: ‘Looking after animals is just like looking after grown-ups’ (Forde, 2020).

Figure 6.

The princess in black and the case of the coronavirus (Hale and Hale, 2020).

Figure 7.

Staying home (Nicholls, 2020).

Finally, there are 15 books that present the outside as a badge of hope, illustrating which people, animals, and various life forms share outdoor space in an envisioned post-lockdown world (See Figures 8 and 9). This hope for sharing outdoor spaces again come with lines such as ‘One day, this strange time will be over’ (Jenner, Wilson and Roberts, 2020) and ‘We are all together [in] this battle with the virus. . . . we’ll win the battle and soon we can go out to play with family, hug our neighbours, and share this beautiful world together with all people, near and far’ (Daemicke and Wu, 2020). In the book I Have a Question about Coronavirus (Gaines and Polsky, 2020), a return to the regular days is even envisioned as depicted in going to school with other children, combined with the words: ‘Lots of things are different, but lots of things will stay the same. I will have regular days again’.

Figure 8.

Be a coronavirus fighter (Daemicke and Wu, 2020).

Figure 9.

Coronavirus: A book for children (Jenner, Wilson, and Roberts, 2020).

In-between spaces: The case of windows and the digital realm

Windows are a prominent visuality in 21 books in the sample. The window serves as a space where characters would be in a threshold between one space (inside) and another (outside) (See Figures 10–15). The inside-outside fluidity manifests in windows differently. For example, in Figures 10 and 11, children are situated inside their houses but accessing the outside world through different framing points—one from the outside and another from the inside, respectively. Figure 12 presents a shared bonding experience of window viewing between a mother, child, and a rabbit. Meanwhile, different houses are shown from afar in Figure 13, wherein children collectively stay at home whilst separated. Finally, Figures 14 and 15 showcase the window as a space of interactions between people, illustrating exchanges of intimacy between a child and her grandparents, and between neighbours while inside their houses, respectively. The visual varieties of windows provide a glimpse of the readers’ see the interface between the inside and outside spaces.

Figure 10.

Coronavirus: A book for children (Jenner, Wilson, and Roberts, 2020).

Figure 15.

Dr. Li and the crown-wearing virus (Cavallo, 2020).

Figure 11.

The spooky shallow cough (Rabb, 2020).

Figure 12.

The inside book (Griffiths, 2020).

Figure 13.

What color is today? (Stephen, 2020).

Figure 14.

I love you: Helping children fight COVID-19 (Ross, 2020).

The digital realm also provides an avenue where the characters become in the hybrid state of inside and outside, as well as, togetherness and separation, between different spaces. There are 17 books in the sample that show visualisations of the digital space. Figure 16, for example, shows a child expressing emotions to an elderly with the words, ‘I’ve been hearing lots of stuff. I’m worried. Are you sick?’ Likewise, Figure 17 presents friends talking to each other and sharing artwork via phone. The digital platforms serve as liminal vehicles that tread spaces where characters can see themselves in a separate-together fusion, which manifests in many different illustrations of video calls with messages such as: ‘You can call, text, email, and talk online with your friends. You can watch movies and videos together online’ (Yen, 2020) and ‘Even though my friend is not having a party, she is still having a birthday. . . . I can call her on the phone and sing Happy Birthday’ (Polsky, 2020).

Figure 16.

Careless corny: A cautionary tale (Horne, Shields, and Albers, 2020).

Figure 17.

Piggy and bunny and the stay-at-home plan (Belgum, 2020).

Discussion

Two insights transpired from the above-mentioned observations: (1) books show how the ‘normal’ in everyday space is disrupted; and (2) there are layers of imagined communities within the everyday spaces depicted in books. These points are articulated below.

Firstly, disruptions of the pandemic manifest in everyday spaces. Examples from the previous section highlight how the pandemic interrupts the normal, not just because of lockdowns but also because everyone has to continue with life within familiar spaces despite an unfamiliar health crisis. This resonates with studies that emphasise the home adjustments children have undergone during the pandemic (See Byrne, 2020; Mehta, 2020; Pecenkovic and Kodric, 2021). The relative permanence of home and the neighbourhood, for example, is juxtaposed to the instability of the pandemic. While domestic spaces remain as settings, the readers can see a back-and-forth between familiarity and change (Fullagar and Pavlidis, 2020). The home as an everyday space bears familiar reference points, but also provides a vantage point to see how characters found disorientation. Understanding the changes as occurring in trivial, everyday domestic spaces sheds light to the oddity of the pandemic’s disruptions. Similarly, the outside neighbourhood and streets, as pre-pandemic everyday spaces, were shown as complex spatial systems that facilitate the immobilities of the book characters. The outdoor spaces serve as a lens to see new kinds of interactions and intimacies from a distance. Likewise, the windows, being trivial parts of houses, serve as a spatial perception that goes beyond the inside-outside binary, uncovering the fluid spaces amidst rigid spatial boundaries set during the pandemic. The window becomes the access whereby the characters could see the outside spaces while being inside home, which gives a sense of both proximity and distance from what exists in the space outside home. Finally, the role of digital technologies is highlighted as a tool that shapes everyday interactions to communicate with friends and family members, facilitating the intimacy as characters encounter enforced isolation.

Secondly, focusing on spaces highlights the layers of spatial collectives from home, to the neighbourhood, to the world. With reference to Anderson’s (1983) notion of imagined communities, the examples of children’s books depict individual identities as strongly tied to an imagined connection with others, a bond that solidified through shared isolation during the pandemic. Examining children’s books about COVID-19 point to stories about innate desire to connect, imagine, and belong to a community amidst distance. Spatial relations is reconfigured during the pandemic, not only in terms of distancing but more importantly in terms of using imagination towards community building be it in seeing each other through windows, clapping for frontliners, video calls, or waving at each other. The examples shown in the previous sections have shown how characters actively negotiate their new spatialities in various ways and generate different forms of spatial expressions to make sense of the pandemic. For instance, books with content about expressions of intimacy at a distance demonstrate the importance of imagining ways to connect with others through gestures as simple as hand waving. Caring while maintaining safe distance reminds readers about the taken-for-granted simple gestures and how important something as small as a hug can be; at the same time, caring at a distance shows readers how intimacy can be shown from afar. Yet the sense of belongingness is fluid as seen in the windows. While there is a clear boundary of the inside as ‘safe’ and the outside as ‘risky’, the window is positioned in the twilight of both spaces. The window serves as a liminal space that captures belonging to both inside and outside communities. Taking the idea of liminality that evinces being a betwixt-and-between space (See Turner, 1967), the windows show more than one social space, presenting to the readers multiple communities they belong to.

The discussion above echoes back to the notion of imagined communities in terms of enabling the readers to link the spaces in books and their own spatial experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. By showing spaces of the inside, the outside, and the in-betweens, the books in the sample collectively provide an interface with the readers’ own community and allude to their ability to generate their own spatial imagination of communities. Noticing children’s spaces in books speaks more broadly about how literature can encourage young readers to be cognisant of their spatial relationships as well as to exercise their agency with accountability for the spaces they use. On a broader scale of analysis, a sense of community among authors and readers also surfaces from the pandemic-themed books. The geographic context in which the readers’ experience of the pandemic is narrated by authors who also share the lockdown experience. As Hones (2008) emphasises, readers and authors share a spatial interaction, in which they are linked by the literature read and written. In the same manner, children’s books about the COVID-19 pandemic, aside from being literary tools, also offer a spatial encounter of readers with the writers. As the predominant theme in the books analysed is spatial responsibility to self and community, literature confirms a sense of trust from the authors that children are allies in dealing with the pandemic, reflecting that ‘children use their own experiences in the everyday world and their knowledge of other stories in relation both to characters and plot to make sense of the stories they hear’ (Davies, 1989: 47; See also Andal, 2020).

Finally, however, it is to be noted that books included in this analysis represent book characters living in middle-class spaces, showing lifestyles that are ‘commonly regarded as normal for western, modern, middle-class children—family homes, schools and clubs organised by adults’ (Connolly and Ennew, 1996: 133). While there is sign of child-oriented sensibilities such as the use of the term ‘grown-ups’, hegemonic assumptions about spaces still emanate in the children’s books narratives. For instance, children characters have their own rooms or space for themselves or houses are presented without crowding issues. There is, however, one book that discusses homelessness (My Hero is You) stating that some characters ‘live in a very crowded city... not everybody is staying home’ (UNOCHA-IASC, 2020). Yet this is an outlier from the rest of the books in the sample. This is a relevant discussion given the perpetual issue of spatial deprivations of children in high-rise housing, the impacts of public space exclusions against street children, and the limited space for families with children in informal settlements (Lilius, 2014; Andrews et al., 2019). Moreover, children in the books are presented as able-bodied who live with hetero-parents in a urban setting. The main limitation of such representations is the tendency to normalise middle-class, heteronormative, and ableist spaces. Ennew (2005) warns that such an assumption dismisses the diversity of childhood experiences from different angles, raising the question of ‘who speaks for whom?’ in representing children in children’s books. This observation, however, does not dismiss the efforts of the books to present diverse versions of children’s spaces such as representing diverse races and languages. Rather, such a consideration provides an opening in accommodating discussions to further deconstruct spatial assumptions about homes in a way that does not glorify middle-class, heteronormative, and ableist spaces. Besides, the books in the sample are found within the broader political context of the COVID-19 pandemic including compliance to protocols, vaccinations, and wearing of masks. This offers an invitation to shift our focus towards more fragmented narratives of children’s spaces that are grounded locally and profoundly shaped by particular contexts.

Conclusion

Space can show so much with so little. The point of this piece has been to examine spatial relations in pandemic-themed children’s books released in early 2020. Bringing to light the relationship between literature and geography suggests that spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic are not merely settings but rather drivers of reckonings, actions, and relationships defined by quarantine and distancing rules. To this end, spatiality in children’s books serves as an important analytical prism that unpacks community belonging during the pandemic. ‘Noticing’ spaces in books reveals boundaries and intimacies, foregrounding how young readers might resonate with spatial changes found in the books about a global health crisis. Still further, whilst this contribution charts the relevance of spatiality to literature, it also suggests the usefulness of children’s literature to geography, that is, literary depictions of space provide an interesting ground for geographers to further investigate how trivial spaces are constructed and made alive by writers and illustrators beyond other worldly genres.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaped and continuously shapes the way we understand our shared spaces (Abdel-Raheem, 2021). Ultimately, it is hoped to spark conversations about how spatial discourses manifest in children’s books. Needless to say, the books observed in this article do not represent the entirety of the children’s books on COVID-19 and many potential spatial analyses are still left unaddressed at the end of this study. For instance, there is little articulation about the differences in duties among various stages of childhood (early, middle and late childhood) and the social class differences. As Kucirkova (2019) argues, there is a need to pay attention to the interaction among children, parents, and books. Yet despite such limitations, the relevance of analysing the earliest published children’s books upon the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic lies in establishing the starting point of observing a growing collection of books dealing with a global health crisis and how they convey spatial concepts, explicitly or not. After all, showing the pandemic, with its changes, adjustments, and uncertainties to children is a challenging task for everyone, be they parents, teachers, authors, illustrators, researchers, among others. With the on-going developments about the pandemic, further research is encouraged, especially on the reception, interpretation, and actions of children in relation to reading books related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research can also look into the nuances of ‘reading about the digital’ and ‘being digital’; the former pertaining to the content of books and the latter as a situation children find themselves in. Such research will enable further examinations of how children make sense of the spatial narratives in the books and in their lives.

ORCID iD

Aireen Grace Andal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7487-4742