How is it, we wonder, as we put down a plate to go pick up our phone, turn to get the coffee but see a plate, and say, “What is it NOW?” when our kid says, “Mama?” and feel a bit bad for snapping, that our kids can keep saying “I’m booored”? Why can’t they just do something?

Well, I’m bored of books about being bored, for one, and approached Felicita Sala’s new book, Bored, with something approaching morbidly cautious curiosity. Felicita Sala is in my pantheon of authors who manage a freshness in putting the child’s view into a book without prettifying, and often without attempting to resolve it.

Yonatan, the utterly brilliant owner and bookseller at Adraba Books in Jerusalem, and I were discussing Is It Asleep? by Olivier Tallec, and he pointed out that the book didn’t try to answer everything. It simply put down the emotional reality. Isn’t grief an interesting thing that happens? We feel all that and we do these things when we’re angry and sad and grieving.

Boredom is another interesting thing that happens. Am I genuinely interested when I’m juggling phone, plate, coffee cup, and exhaustedly snapping at my kids? Of course not. And my kids are bored because I’m not paying attention and they want to do something interesting. If I thought enough about it, I’d be bored at that time, only I’m too busy being worn out to be properly bored. Being bored can be great, because just think of all the interesting things that come out of boredom. For example, if you’re really bored by books about being bored, you may, and I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess this may have happened to Felicita Sala… Make a book like this.

Books about being bored go like this:

Child is bored, child realizes that even in the greyest and most dull days there is a subtle charm of things to do, child recognizes the true glory of a fragile skeleton leaf with a passion that would bring the wisest philosopher to shame, and is no longer bored.

To be fair, I own some of these and they can be good. Many are serviceable in a classroom for your social-emotional learning curriculum, so go ahead and get them. Some have quite nice art. They are rarely fine literature, or a perfect example of the picture book. And I actually don’t even think this is the pinnacle of Felicita Sala, who set herself a fantastically high bar with If You Run Out of Words.

But she brought a freshness to a really dull, worn out topic in picture books, painting an honest picture of boredom in both language and art. It turns out that, represented accurately, Rita’s boredom is an absorbing topic. Being bored takes Rita on a journey, being bored positively explodes reality into infinity, creating new people from the very fabric of her mind, and squaring the circle of imagination.

In form, I’m not sure that Felicita Sala’s Bored is all that different from the standard “books about being bored,” but in quality, the sheer tangibility of Rita’s boredom on the page feels more textured, more accurate.

I continue to wonder what’s so fascinating about boredom to picture book creators, mind you. Let’s think of The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, for example. I hadn’t read this in ages– I think I thought the Changeling would be scared of Ferdinand’s danger, but my little one pretty much is Ferdinand, so I had to read it to him, and it was brilliantly rewarding.

He understood instinctively how Ferdinand didn’t want to fight or be rough, because he’s a sweet boy who hates fighting and roughness. He loves flowers, and Ferdinand loves flowers. But I noticed the mother, at the beginning, who initially worried her little baby bull wasn’t like the others and would be lonely until accepting he’s just like that.

And the book simply left it as such: he wasn’t like the others, he preferred quietness, and, having been utterly, good-naturedly gentle and unexcitable, he was dropped off at home and that’s it. It should be a boring ending. Deflating, anticlimactic. And, somehow, it’s not. It simply puts it down, and leaves it at that:

We, rooting for Ferdinand being who he is, a gentle, beautiful, flower-loving bull, are glad to see he goes home to his cork tree.

What is there to be afraid of in boredom? Felicita Sala was, I imagine, wondering. And after running off with Rita, I feel quite pleased to say I found her boredom a little too exciting for my taste, all things considered, but it was a gorgeous read-aloud.