VOICES IN THE PARK

l  Author: Anthony Browne

l  Analysis:

Characters- Protagonist: The rich woman, her son (Charles), the poor man, his daughter (Smudge)

                   - Foil characters: Their dogs (Victoria and Albert)

                   - They are flat characters.

Setting- Backdrop setting

Plot:

Conflict- Four different voices came from the four characters.

Major events- The characters went to the park. The rich woman did not like her son and her dog to play with the poor. She even looked impatient and rude. However, the poor did not care that much. They just had lots of fun in the park.

Denouement- The rich children came home with a bad mood while the poor children took home a flower and used it to make her father a cup of tea.

Theme- Money does not represent everything. Happiness comes from feelings instead of materials.

Narrative Point of View- Internal Narrator

Style- Words are easy.
 - Sentences are long in order to describe the settings and the feelings of the characters.
  - It has few dialogues because most of the texts are the thoughts of the characters.

Tone- Didactic

l  Reflection:

This picture book had extremely profound meanings. When seeing the title, I just thought it might be an interesting book. Maybe it was about animals. However, I was surprised after I read through it. It contained several important meanings that both children and adults could learn. I listed two of them below. First, it told us that money does not represent happiness. We could see the rich kid in the story. He was so rich, but all the things he wanted to do were limited by his mother. He was not as happy as the poor kid in the story. What’s worse, his mother did not notice it. She just kept being impatient and rude to others. The second meaningful concept was that do not judge people by their appearances. We could learn this from the rich boy. He did not care so much as his mother. He became friends with the poor kid without teasing her dirty clothes. This is really important, especially among children. In sum, the book truly gave me a new thought about children’s books. Profound meanings could also be found in them. When reading them, we could learn the deep meanings and enjoy the delicate pictures at the same time.