All Our Work Holds Good from Slate

An interesting look at one of my very favorite picture books, Ox-Cart Man. Seriously. Every family should own this book. Really.

In Hall’s rewriting, the children’s book is also about endlessness, but in a completely different way. Ox-Cart Man, the book, is about a family, and how the small daily work of this family accumulatively makes their lives better. The addition of the family changes the poem from one man’s annual toil to a story about what we hope to do for the people we love, and how we hope to alter the future, just a little, for good. The book is endless because it imagines a future unrolling endlessly, each year just a small improvement upon the one before, built on the things we make with the people dear to us.