In The Umbrella Party, two notable Canadian artists have created an amusing tale of desire and satisfaction. Christie loves umbrellas and when she invites her school friends to her birthday party, she urges them to give her umbrellas for presents. Plotting to cure her of this boring enthusiasm, the friends all agree to do just what she asks and – sure enough – Christie gets eight umbrellas for her birthday, plus a tiny paper one and a giant beach umbrella from her grandfather. The friends consider this a remarkably boring birthday party until they’re taken to the beach for a picnic. Christie takes her umbrellas, too. When a great wind begins to blow and a rainstorm ensues, everyone gathers under Christie’s umbrellas, which, her friends agree, have their uses after all.

Janet Lunn credits her own grandfather as the source of this story, but it’s a tale that readily adapts to any situation where a child loves something that her peers haven’t much use for. Christie loves umbrellas for the sensory pleasures of looking at light through their various colours and shapes and hearing the sounds of rain falling on them. Her cheerful refusal to be dismayed by the opinions of her friends makes her an admirable counter-example for our youth culture in which everyone is urged to want exactly the same things. Besides pointing out the practical and esthetic value of umbrellas, however, Lunn’s story is about the pleasure of having a lot of something you like.

Umbrellas seem a gift of a subject for an illustrator and Kady MacDonald Denton delights in their mushroom shapes and multifarious hues and patterns. Each of the children mentioned in the text is also given a distinctive identity by the illustrator and can be followed from picture to picture. While The Umbrella Party doesn’t have quite the sense of surprise and rightness that distinguished Lunn’s first picture book, Amos’s Sweater, it has a similar concern with the assertion of one’s individuality, and considerable charm in both pictures and text.