Book Review: King Billy and the Royal Road
When I was invited to review this book, my heart leapt for joy. You see, by profession I am a primary school teacher, so I just love children’s books. And I love tarot, so the thought of a children’s book based on tarot and aimed at the 5-8 year old market excited me to the core. And then I learnt that the premise of the book is a young boy’s journey through the arcana, and written in rhyming verse. I love rhyme. So I instantly accepted the challenge, and waited with bated breath for the book to arrive.
The book was everything it had said it would be.
The author, Reg Ajuonuma, wrote this “take on how a child emerges from the embrace of a parent to find their own place in the world” for his own son, drawing inspiration from his own interest in tarot. It is intended to explore the process of individuation in the child, and does so as Billy emerges from the egocentric cocoon of his loving home and encounters a whole mob of crooks whose objective seems to be to pull him out of his arrogant naivety.
The artist, Beverly Young, brings a circus style to the Tarot backgrounds, but with quite a dark twist. The elements of darkness in the journey are made more sinister by the black and white images. There is something about the pictures which drew to me to try and find little snippets of symbolism, but I was sorely disappointed at the lack of depth to them. I would have liked to see these images presented in colour to lift the ambience of the book.
Young Billy starts out as any young boy does, comfortable and spoiled in his protected existence; but on this morning Mum doesn’t wake up, full of “snivels and sniffles and snot”. Well, having been weaned on Roald Dahl and Spike Milligan, any book that opens with such grossly descriptive phraseology, and with a rhyme and rhythm which has a distinctive beat, draws me straight in. So I read on with glee, as Billy bravely took the leap of faith and set out with his gurgling gut to find his own food.
Image: Katalin Patnaik
Although Billy’s story does follow the arcana, there are some major departures from tradition. For example, as he leaves his porch we are faced with the first hint of the macabre, as Billy is confronted by a gruff, ferocious looking dog who is growling and pulling on its chain, unable to escape. Perhaps I’m a little old-fashioned, but this just doesn’t tie in with my impression of a loving yap dog looking out for our Fool, warning him of danger but trotting happily along as a companion on the adventure. I am left wondering what exactly is the purpose of this ferocious hound. How is he to help Billy on his way?
Moving on, Billy meets the first character of our arcana and tries to make a deal for food. It turns out the Magician is a trickster, and Billy comes away empty-handed, stubbornly refusing to accept the tools offered to help him on his journey. Personally, I was left stunned by this! In last month’s Tarot Practise thread over on the TABI forum we even discussed the concept that the Magician can be a bit of a trickster…. but still, I prefer to think of him as wise and balanced with a heart of Gold, with the tools he needs at his fingertips to set about righting the World.
And so it goes on; Billy bumps from unlikeable character to unlikeable character; meeting some, skipping some, and assuming the guise of others. The journey seems to be in sequence with The Fool’s journey through the Major Arcana, but even so I struggled to identify the characters as they arose. And I didn’t like the characters. With one sickly exception, I could find little hope in any of them, their lessons were consistently harsh – indeed, far too harsh for a boy of that age in my opinion.
As a teacher I would have loved to find a book that would act as a fun and gentle introduction to the tarot for my little ones. This isn’t it. As an adult I found the lessons taught to be heart-breaking and morbid. As a child I know this is the sort of read which would give me nightmares. But perhaps that is what kids nowadays enjoy…
So I decided to mail this book onwards to Katalin, our co-chair of TABI, who has a little boy of 6 – apparently just the right age. You can read her review here: Book Review: King Billy and the Royal Road (a parent’s perspective)
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