On hearing of the recent death of illustrator Shel Silverstein, I began to meditate on the power of black and white. Would his 1964 classic The Giving Tree even get published today? A gentle, slightly melancholy fable illustrated with line drawings? Where’s the hook? Where’s the commodity tie-in? (Well, maybe if we bubble-package it with a seedling and a yellow plastic trowel.) And isn’t it too bad that nobody thought to brighten it up with a bit of colour? Likewise why has nobody bothered to reissue a full-colour version of M.B. Goffstein’s Goldie the Dollmaker or Florence Parry Heide’s The Shrinking of Treehorn. Zoom at Sea got a coloured cover for the 1990s but why didn’t they go all the way and colourize all Ken Nutt’s illustrations? I mean, get millennial, folks – black and white just isn’t going to cut it in this age of colour monitors.

In the midst of these grumpy, sarcastic meditations, what should come across my desk but a book designed to vaporize my cynicism about current publishing trends. Stormy Night, by Montreal artist Michèle Lemieux, has a deceptively simple premise. A small girl goes to bed but she cannot sleep because questions keep flooding through her mind. These questions, sitting individually on fields of stark white, are matched on the facing page with black-and-white line drawings. Periodically we check back in with the little girl, seeing her in her bed, or under her bed, or staring out her window, her dog Fido providing a counterpoint to her emotions. The girl’s thoughts range from the purely theoretical (“Where does infinity end?”) to the personal (“Am I nice looking?”) to that three a.m. heartstopper (“And what if there’s nothing after death?”). The questions are wonderful – moving and pawky and, most of all, respectful of a child’s inner life.

The drawings, however, are what give this book its depth. Lemieux has a gift for making abstract concepts concrete, a gift for visual metaphor. The girl’s fear of “being separated from everyone I love,” for example, is illustrated by a cake on top of which is a little village. But one wedge of the cake has been removed and sits on a flat cake server at some remove in the foreground of the picture. On it stands a little scratchy figure gesturing wildly to the distant village, to no avail. Abandonment? Yes, got it in one. The illustration to “Will the world come to an end someday?” shows a devil rolling up the landscape like a carpet. The question “What about me – do I have an imagination?” shows a child staring at herself through a telescope pressed right up against a mirror. The profound and the goofy nudge close to each other. One illustration shows a head hinged open à la Monty Python and a small man vacuuming its surfaces clean. The question? “What if death simply erases our memory, so that we can start over somewhere else?”

This is a surprising book in every way. Design, concept, marketing, I haven’t been this surprised by a children’s book published in Canada since Annick Press published Saranohair in 1992. The shape of Stormy Night – short, fat, and wide – allows no easy classification. There is minimal front matter, no jacket, no blurb, no author biography, and we’re on page 10 before we get any text at all. This is a book that trusts itself and the reader. We are obviously to think for ourselves.

Another surprise is Michèle Lemieux, or at least what I know of her. She did the lovely gentle illustrations to such classics as Peter and the Wolf and Amahl and the Night Visitors and the playful, Chagall-like watercolours that adorn the poetry collection Voices on the Wind. Her drawings in Stormy Night reveal a much darker side, a fondness for decapitation and dismemberment reminiscent of Shel Silverstein, and an eye for the macabre that makes her second cousin to Tomi Ungerer, even edging into the territory of Ralph Steadman.

A third surprise is the publisher. This book has the risk-taking feel of something produced by a small press, not a large well-established company with a firm identity. Franklin it isn’t. Stormy Night was originally published in Germany and it certainly has a European sensibility. Kudos to Kids Can for publishing it here.

Conventionally one ends a book review by alerting the reader and buyer to the potential audience for the material. The book won the prestigious Ragazzi Prize, an international book award given at the Bologna Book Fair, in the young adult fiction category, and young adults are certainly one audience. But age categories aren’t the whole story here. For example, this book would appeal to art lovers. Lemieux pays sly tribute to Picasso, Dali, and Michelangelo in her drawings, and the whole production reverberates with a celebration of imagination and creativity. There are ongoing visual references to Don Quixote, and one small piece of text: “Dad once told me about a man who lived completely in his imagination.” Finally, though, this book is for thinkers of all ages. Where do dreams go after you dream them? Will I be a hero some day? Is my whole life already worked out in advance? The rhythm of this book demands a fair number of blank white pages. Its honesty and energy give you permission to fill them with your own rage, fear, or playfulness the next time a personal stormy night comes along.