The Importance Of Picture Books In Private, By Anthony Browne

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Anthony Browne (1946- ) is a well-known author due to his picture books – he has approximately forty picture books to his name-. Among them, The Tunnel is an appropriate example to be considered so as to show the importance of reading picture books. As Browne states “I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books, and the reading of both pictures and words. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book” (see URL 5).
The core message conveyed by the author by telling this story is the importance of our siblings: we have to love our siblings, since they are the first friends we have; for this reason, we have to care for them, and avoid
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The latter are at the beginning, the middle and the end of the picture book, - being the ones at the beginning and at the end the same-. Among them, the double spread at the beginning and at the end are crucial (figure 8), since they symbolize the development of the two characters: at the beginning, the double spread means the difference between the sister and the brother, whereas in the end, the double spread signifies that the two characters have learnt a lesson, which is that no matter how different we are as regards to likes and dislikes, we are siblings, which is what really counts. On the contrary, single page illustrations are used to tell readers the story of two ordinary people and their routine, whereas double page illustrations are used to emphasize important details of the lives of these two characters. This way of telling the story seems to follow a pattern since the use of double spread pages and single pages is similar in

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