Melanie Watt's Scaredy Squirrel Ventures Out of His Tree

There are more squirrels haunting the pages of children’s literature than I realized. One of them is Scaredy Squirrel, the protagonist of Melanie Watt’s cartoonish series, which contains four books to date. The first, Scaredy Squirrel, introduces the nervous fellow and sets up the basic format that his adventures will follow.

On the jacket, Scaredy speaks for himself, telling readers what to expect from the book to come. He concludes with a cautionary note about a certain demographic for which this story is not suitable. Here, it’s green Martians. On the facing page, there is a warning containing instructions that readers must follow before beginning the book. In this case, he advises applying anti-bacterial soap.

For the story itself, Watt keeps to the third person, present tense as she describes Scaredy’s current dilemma. In this book, he’s an extreme recluse. I’m quite the homebody myself, so I can sympathize, but Scaredy Squirrel never leaves his tree. Not ever. There are too many scary things that could be out there. Martians in the air! Sharks in the river! We see a list of the things that worry him the most, and only two - germs and poison ivy - are very plausible. But Scaredy has an emergency kit with supplies to deal with all of these possibilities, should the need ever arise to leave his tree.

Watt’s writing style matches the personality of the squirrel. It has a hyper edge to it. As a story, the book is only somewhat straightforward, as it makes several side trips into lists and diagrams with helpful notes on them. While one of the books in the series specifically has to do with going to sleep, I wouldn’t generally recommend them for bedtime. These would be better for broad daylight, at a time when there’s no need for the reader or read-to to wind down after a long day.

At some point toward the end of the story, Scaredy’s grand plans inevitably backfire. He has to adjust accordingly. When he does so in this book, he learns something very important about himself and the world around him. Unlike in, say, Green Eggs and Ham, it doesn’t result in a dramatic change to his personality - there are, after all, three more books in the series, and probably more to come - but it’s just enough to make him willing to come out of his tree once in a while.

In some ways, I’m not so different from Scaredy Squirrel. For kids who are nervous like me, this book helps to demonstrate that while there are legitimate reasons to fear aspects of “the unknown,” there can also be advantages to exploring unfamiliar territory.