The King and Nothing, oversized, illustrated magic for the forever bookshelf

I’m a middle-aged dude, and The King and Nothing feels like a great illustrated book that I had forgotten about. It’s that book you used to spend hours looking at the pictures, unconsciously learning the sight words and getting lost in a book in a beanbag chair. You were five-to-seven years old and learning to love to read, but you probably weren’t calling it that then. Sometimes books like this come across our desk. In a very polite, unassuming manner, they speak to us as if they’re a character from Wallace and Gromit and ask us to read it.

There’s something about the oversized, sparse, playful nature of The King and Nothing that covertly tells us that we need it. The other week I was getting frustrated about my students’ inability to think for themselves. They’re challenged to have one nano-second of downtime or confusion. Oddly enough, just then a video popped up on my YouTube feed about how today’s youth rarely accept the gift of nothing. It’s that gift, and the joy in not having our minds be tasked with doing, watching or continually thinking about a thing that makes up The King and Nothing.

The king of an unnamed land has everything. He has every book, animal, toy and thing that he desires. He has so much of everything that he starts to wonder if he could have nothing. This leads him on a quest to search the dessert, sky and sub-particles of the things that he has in his quest for nothing. He calls his court and some common folk in for an audience to demand that he be brought nothings. A tiny leaf flutters down from above at the same time. Even though it’s a minute thing, it’s still something, so he decides to burn it, which still produces something.

The king goes to the forest to daydream, but even his rambling thoughts under the trees are something.  He returns from the forest to disassemble his vast shelves that house all of his things. His crown is removed from his head he realizes that all of his clothes are still something. As the illustration zooms out, audiences see a tiny, butt-naked king, staring at two pages of nothing, beautiful blank nothing.

This is where you adult readers, need to stop yourself from immediately thinking that this is a message book. It is not attempting to indoctrinate young audiences into a religion that espouses a minimalist lifestyle. It’s not an anti-capitalist statement softly telling kids that they need to live in a tent in the woods without any possessions. You need to remind yourselves that sometimes a good book is just a good book and the story exists just to be a silly, fun escapade that kids will want to read and enjoy.

Author and illustrator Olivier Tallec has a joyous time telling the king’s story. The perspective varies from page to page, with the king appearing a couple of times on the page in order to demonstrate passage of time, while other pages have a close-up of his face. There are a couple of instances where he’s shown in contrast to the vastness of something huge. The text is succinct. It’s short enough not to intimidate young ages, and compliments the illustrations in ways that effortlessly push the story forward, while adding subtext that will make them think more about what’s not there.

Stop, you mean the book helps you think about nothing? Plus, if you’re thinking about something that’s not there, aren’t you really thinking about a thing that you want, which is the opposite of nothing? Stop, you adult readers need to chill out again and simply accept the basic joy and nothingness that The King and Nothing is wallowing in.

This is the fun, silly sort of illustrated book that the carpet and story time crowd in pre-K through mid-elementary school will love. It’s got a solid story with laugh-out-loud illustrations. The story is strong enough to stand on its own, but also has exit opportunities for kids to share, or for the adults reading it aloud to ask thought-provoking questions. The King and Nothing is an illustrated book that will end up in our forever bookshelf. Its timeless nature and simple approach makes it irresistible to young audiences who don’t know that they want to be asked about the nature of nothing, because they love something.

The King and Nothing is by Olivier Tallec and is available on Milky Way Picture Books.

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