Zagarenski, Pamela. The Whisper. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

On first read, Pamela Zagarenski's The Whisper can be interpreted as a story about agency. A girl–nameless and described throughout as little–is given a book to borrow by her teacher, an authority figure charged with instilling knowledge and understanding to young minds.

In this double-page spread, the girl is located nearly centered on the recto. She sits alone on the uncluttered, clean, and bright rug, an area associated with story time for children. Of all the figures and objects in the spread, the girl is the focus, depicted in a bold red jacket, her shape clearly outlined. Tilting her head at an angle, she looks down, into the enormous book she holds, suggesting an adventure is about to begin within it. And yet, when the reader takes in the entirety of the spread, the fox peering into the girl's window on the verso cannot be ignored. Placed comparatively higher on the page, the fox points their nose downward and casts their eyes on the girl and the book. The fox's stare establishes the more prominent diagonal line in the image, and sets up the tension in the illustration: who has the agency on the spread, the girl, or the fox? The text complements the images and presents the fox's instructions for reading the book.

The book the girl holds is wordless; Zagarenski informs the reader, prior to this spread, of the girl's resulting distress ("Where were the words? Where were the stories? It's just not a book of stories, without any words"). The girl lacks the confidence to take on the task, or begin her adventure, until she hears the fox's "knowing and wise" whisper. The illustration normalizes the idea that girls lack agency and are dependent on others–often authority figures and/or men–for help or encouragement. Coats contends, "in order for gender schemas and scripts to be challenged or disrupted on a societal level, sufficient numbers of stories with girl protagonists are required to normalize a broad range of female experience" (121). The story ends on the back end papers, where the reader learns that the fox is a girl. In turning the clever male fox of lore into a girl, Zagarenski upends concern for agency and, instead, presents a tale of girls supporting each other and lifting each other up.

Works Cited

Coats, Karen. “Gender in Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Routledge, 2018, pp. 119-127.

Zagarenski, Pamela. The Whisper. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.