Jon Klassen once again uses short, declarative sentences, a minimalist palette and a hat to deliver a wallop of an ethics lesson. Having explored the victim's point of view in his debut picture book, I Want My Hat Back, Klassen now shines a light into the mind of a thief.
A tiny fish sporting a light blue derby hat states, "This is not mine. I just stole it." It's a doozy of an opener and an echo of the starting lines of the bear hero in the first book: "My hat is gone. I want it back." Whereas I Want My Hat Back framed the action in vertical pages tall enough to accommodate the bear, This Is Not My Hat unfolds horizontally, to follow the fish's underwater path. Klassen rendered the bear's world in the tomato-red of his hat, earthy browns and forest green, while the fish thief's story plays out against the black of the ocean's depths, with sea weeds and plants in shades of aqua and gray.
In both books, the eyes tell the story. No one speaks except the tiny fish thief. But the narrator's words often appear at odds with the action in the full-spread illustrations. After confessing having stolen the hat while the victim slept, the tiny fish states, "And he probably won't wake up for a long time," just as the fried-egg-size eyes of the giant fish pop open, turn upward to check on the now-absent hat, then shift to cigarette-shaped eyes, pupils forward, emitting bubbles that look like smoke. "He probably won't know it was me who took it," the text reads. Children will know otherwise and laugh at the irony. On the next spread, only the giant fish's tail fin is visible, in hot pursuit of the culprit.
The small fish makes another tactical error in trusting a crab ("he said he wouldn't tell anyone which way I went"). The only evidence of the tiny thief is a stream of bubbles, as the crab is all eyes, looking as deadpan as Klassen's other creatures. Meanwhile, the crab--terror visible on its face, eyes enlarged like ping pong balls--wordlessly points a claw in the direction of the tiny fish. Strands of sea grass hold fish-shaped leaves, so when they thicken together, they serve as an ideal camouflage. But will it be enough? We see the giant fish in pursuit of the burglar fish. We see the giant fish swim out. With the hat.
Klassen once again gets the tone pitch perfect. "I know it's wrong to steal a hat. I know it does not belong to me. But I am going to keep it. It was just too small for him anyway," says the tiny fish. His bare-bones text and enigmatic images leave the proceedings open to interpretation. And the ethics questions could keep kids debating for days, laughing all the way to consensus. --Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Talker: Jon Klassen creates an ethics dilemma in a picture book companion to I Want My Hat Back, this time from the thief's perspective.