Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

NorthSouth Books, via NetGalley, graciously offered me an ARC of this children’s book, Rainbow Fish and the Great Escape by Marcus Pfister, translated from the German by David Henry Wilson. Seeing the cover of this book brought on a flood of memories for me.

This is book #10 in the Rainbow Fish series, the first book being published in 1992, when I was a young mom with a two year old and an infant at home. Fast forward five years later, and that infant was graduating from kindergarten. My husband and I gave her Rainbow Fish as a graduation present and we each wrote a little sweet note to her inside the cover.

By the time she started kindergarten she was already reading, much to our shock, something that had been discovered by her preK-4 teacher. In the afternoon when the preK-3 teachers were preparing afternoon snack, they would get her from her classroom across the hall to read a book to the preK-3 students in their room.

She absolutely loved Rainbow Fish, mostly because of the bright, colorful scales and underwater creatures, but also for the message of sharing. In the interim years, there has been some controversy over the theme found in that story, giving something of yourself to others, something important, in order to make friends.

It’s been decades since I thought about Rainbow Fish, and I was unaware that it was now a complete series of 9 books, with this book, #10, coming out soon. Today I spent part of my afternoon reading Rainbow Fish and the Great Escape and reminiscing about my years of reading picture books to my daughters.

The illustrations are still bright and colorful in this new addition to the series. Rainbow Fish is still our narrator and main character. It is still a story that aims at teaching a lesson, this time a lesson about team work. It’s also a cautionary tale about commercial fishing with trawling nets, but that’s a topic for another day and another essay.

I think Rainbow Fish could be another lesson as well. Marcus Pfister had an idea, he took to his paints and pen and created a story that has stayed alive for over 30 years. It seems like Rainbow Fish is immortal, and perhaps Marcus Pfister has obtained his own version of immortality as his lovely books will live on long after him.

When Ray Bradbury was a young boy, a fortune teller at the circus tapped him on the forehead with a hot poker and told him he would live forever. He went on to become a famous science fiction writer, and his stories are still being read today, granting Bradbury immortality as well.

Congratulations to Marcus Pfister and NorthSouth Books on another beautiful book!