"This Kerfuffle is, so far, not a brouhaha."

Thus Tweeted one of the participants in what is shaping up to be the literary scandal of the new (OK, I know there's debate on when the new decade actually begins, but I give up) decade: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, along with actor/writer/Play School presenter Rhys Muldoon, has penned a children's picture book!

The book, Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle, is to be illustrated by Carla Zapel, who is unknown to me (Google suggests she's a graphic designer, I'm guessing this is her first children's book—let me know if you know different) and published by the venerable House of Onions. Along the lines of Bo: Commander in Leash, one of many picture books about the Obama's dog (which I gather was written before the dog was even adopted and anyone knew for sure what kind of dog he'd be—you'll remember how Obama famously promised his daughters a puppy when he won the election), Jasper and Abby... will apparently follow the adventures of the Prime Minister's pets around the grounds of The Lodge. Proceeds, as you might expect, will go to charity.

The story was released in today's press—it's all over the web, so just Google "Kevin Rudd children's book" and you'll find it. The quotes are pretty much the same in every story, with Rudd crediting Muldoon as coming to him with the idea for the book and also saying (Rudd that is) some fairly unfortunate things about it not being "the most demanding text" he's ever worked on (tell it to Sendak, Mr Prime Minister!) and putting a human face on his pets...

Comments on the news reports are as you'd expect—largely negative, typically hostile and generally unquotable without a million "sic"s (honestly, I don't know why I read the comments section on 99% of webites, they either enrage or depress me, or both) along the lines of "what is Rudd doing writing a kids book when he should be running the country", yada yada.

This doesn't wash with me, frankly. If Winston Churchill could run Great Britain and win WWII with the (alleged) daily habit of a bottle of champagne before he even got out of bed (well, that's what the tour guide told us in the Cabinet War Rooms), I think our PM can take a breather to look over the drafts of a co-written picture book of a few hundred words. (Come on, no one seriously thinks he did much of the actual writing, or was involved in the editing, do they? Correct me if I'm wrong, Mr Rudd!) CORRECTION: I have since been contacted by a very reliable source and assured that Mr Rudd was indeed involved in both the writing and the editing and that it is "not in his nature to just hand it over", which actually rings pretty true. So apologies to Mr Rudd for doubting his involvement. Happy to make the retraction.

Honestly, we've become so boring and utilitarian in our attitude to politicians and public spending and so on. We can't have fire works on New Year's Eve because the trains don't run on time. Yawn. It's as if every last second, and every last cent, has to be accounted for, all work and no play and frankly, I think it makes Jack and Jill a very dull pair altogether.

But as you probably expect, this being a children's book blog which has done its fair share of whinging and complaining about perceived slights against our goodly professional over the years, some of the objections have also come from the children's lit community who, on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere no doubt, have had a quiet little grumble about yet another celebrity children's book deal. I can understand that, I almost had the same initial reaction myself when I opened the paper over my banana and youghurt. But I actually think this is not the same as the most annoying and, yes, cynical of those celebrity publishing deals, where the celebrity trots out some line about having to write the book because (as both Madonna AND our own George Negus have reportedly said) there weren't any decent children's books out there.

I get as hot under the collar as anyone about those situations, knowing how hard it is for even the most genuinely unpublished talented writers to get their manuscript seen, much less signed to a multi-million dollar, multi-book deal—and for something that is in many cases almost certain to have been ghost-written. And of course, there's the deeply frustrating assumption that comes packaged along with these deals that anyone can dash off a kids' book, if only they had time. Margo Lanagan called this "impertinence" on Twitter today, and I couldn't agree more. (Someone else also tweeted that possibly apocryphal story about Margaret Atwood and the neuro-surgeon who thought he'd try his hand at writing novels when he retired... you can guess the rest.)

But is this book/deal that? I don't really think it is. For a start, no-one is making claims that the book had to be written because of the dire state of writing and publishing for children. And with the Prime Minister's name front and centre on the book, it's hard to argue that this one took the better-deserved place of a published or up-and-coming unpublished writer. (Or is our Prime Minister in fact, that most egregious of things—a queue jumper?!) I very much doubt that this book was published in the place of any other book for children that may have made it to Allen and Unwin's schedule for the year—but even if it did, well, none of us have read it yet and maybe, just maybe, it's good and deserving pf publication.

Because—here's a literary scandal in the making—not every celebrity children's book is bad. There are plenty we could, arguably should and certainly do trash with ease, but for every ill-conceived mess like, OK, sticking my neck out here (sorry to my friends at Macmillan) Toni Collette's bizarre foray into picture books, there's the well-regarded ouvre of Jamie Lee Curtis. Sophie Lee's junior novel from last year, Edie Amelia and the Monkey Shoe Mystery, was extremely successful, I thought. (By which I mean a good story, well-told, not copies sold.) The truth is, I've always thought that creative people are often multi-skilled; Dirk Bogarde is as highly regarded a writer as he is an actor, and it's only in fairly recent times that we've become cynical about the actor-singer, when once this was simply the norm. It was expected that performers could sing, dance and juggle while making us laugh and cry in equal measure. So why shouldn't we allow for the possibility that people with creative skills in one area may be have creative skills in another?

Which brings me to the other celebrity name on the cover of Jasper and Abby... , Rhys Muldoon. It was Muldoon who tweeted this blog post's title this afternoon, and I assume from it he felt a bit beleaguered by all those badly spelt comments and huffy responses from the children's book community—although none, as far as I can tell, have been directed at him. I don't know Muldoon (although we are friendly on Twitter), and I have no way of knowing if he can write a decent children's book (and also no reason to think he can't), but I do know that he's a well-regarded actor and broadcaster, as well as a well-loved presenter of Play School. And having worked as an editor on the Play School books back in the late 90s when I worked at ABC Books, I can say from experience that Play School presenters are, by and large, far better placed to understand how children's books work than, say, your average football star. 

I do also appreciate that the topic of the book—the PM's pets playing in the grounds of The Lodge—may not on the face of it be the most promising premise for a children's book. (Although I would have thought the same about a photographic picture book about a dog travelling around Australia too, and it turned out to be one of my favourite books of 2009.) But hear me out, because I think there's another reason to be reasonably positive about this book—at least until we've read it.

I keep pretty well up to date with as much international children's publishing as I can, particularly from the US and UK, and I have long admired how well the US does children's books about their great historical figures and their political and cultural institutions. We do very little by the way of such books—where are the Australian children's books about, say the 1960s Freedom Bus rides through country NSW in the wake of the civil rights movement in the US? Or the Green Bans of the 70s? Where are the biographies for children of great Australians outside of the education market? I know we have a smaller book-buying market here and it's hard to make the numbers work on non-fiction, but here comes a book that might, if we're lucky, give kids a small insight into government through the (this still makes me chuckle) "human faces" of a black cat called Jasper and a golden retriever called Abby.

So let's wait until we've actually read it to completely dismiss it. Let's not turn the Kerfuffle into a full-blown brouhaha just yet!

The villains of the piece... (Photo pinched from an online newspaper. Sorry about that.)

ADDENDUM: Please note I am not suggesting that Jasper and Abby was ghost-written, just that I assume that Mr Rudd was less directly involved in the writing and editing than Mr Muldoon. And I could even be wrong about that!