Picture Book

No Trouble at All
Sally Grindley and Eleanor Taylor

No Trouble at All is a picture book in which the pictures do not always agree with the text. It is a story of two little bears that stay overnight at their Grandpa’s cottage in the woods. The setting of the story is provided solely through the pictures; the timber cottage has an oak tree through its centre, which divides the house and separates the activities of the adult and child bears. Time is not explicitly referred to in the text. It is by the clock at the side of the bed, which changes during the story and the night sky shown through the window that we know the relationship between action and time.


All of the pictures in the story span two pages and touch the edges of the pages, there are no boxes for text or illustrations, the two overlap. This acts as a clue to the importance of both the pictures and the text in the telling of the story. The text is from the point of view of the Grandpa and it is a conversation that he is having at times with himself and sometimes with his companion the cat. It is unusual for children’s literature to be written from the perspective of an adult, however because we are seeing the young bears activities in the pictures we are in league with the young bears. We know more than the narrator and this adds humour. The cat forms a bridge between the world of the adult bear and the young bears, as the cat sees the mischief of the young bears and is sometimes involved, seen on the eighth double page spread, when he is eating the jam spilt by the young bears. The cat is never referred to in the text; it is only through the pictures that we see whom the Grandpa is directing his thoughts to.

The pictures act to contradict the Grandpa’s presentation of the young bears as “No trouble at all”, the title of the picture book. On the first double page spread the text and the picture support each other, the text reads:

“Shhh! They’re fast asleep.
Don’t wake them up”

The picture shows a large bear standing by the bedside of two young bears in bed with their eyes closed. The next double page spread shows the first contradiction between text and picture. On the left hand page the bears are sat up in bed awake and on the right hand side of the page the Grandpa is walking down the stairs with the cat on his shoulder, who is looking back at the young bears. The text reads:

“They’re such good
little bears when
they come to stay.”


The adult world and child world is separated on the double page spreads throughout most of the picture book. The first contradictory page shows the two perspectives on different pages, the second, third and fourth contradictory pages show the young bears playing at the top of the page in the upper part of the house and the adult bear on the bottom of the page, downstairs. The images inside the cottage are in all but one cross sections of the house, joining the images. This acts to unite the two scenes in time and space. The eighth double page spread is the only image not to join the adult’s and the child’s worlds. The image of the Grandpa is on the right hand page, it is close up, this change in composition alarms the reader mirroring the Grandpa’s response to a noise. The close up draws our attention to the page that the Grandpa is on before we look at the left hand side of the page with the young bears, which explains the noise.


The text is mostly grouped in one chunk near the Grandpa linking the text with the character; the sixth double page spread splits the text for the first time into three chunks. The grouping of the text in this way shows three distinct thoughts that the Grandpa has had, because we read left to right we know which chunk to read first and this tells us the sequence of the thoughts. The first grouping is in the young bears bedroom, it is a picture of their bed with two pillows disguised as bodies under the duvet. On the tree trunk that divides the two bedrooms is the second block of text:

“I’ll just fetch
my slippers”

and the final text is in the Grandpa’s bedroom where he stands at the door and exclaims:

“Ah, here they are.”

This is a comic statement because the Grandpa is referring to his slippers but the same statement could be applied to the young bears who are hiding under the bed.


Part of the young bears adventures involve them sneaking downstairs and out of the house, when they sneak downstairs the stairs are on the left hand side of the page, when the young bears return up the stairs they return on the right hand side of the page, this shows the difference in direction that the bears are travelling in and hints towards the close of the story. The relationship between the text and the pictures remains contradictory till the final double page spread when the pictures mirror the message of the text. Sandwiching the contradictory text and pictures with text that works with the pictures helps to bring the story to an end. The text is split into two chunks on the final page, a chunk by the sleeping young bears and a chunk by the Grandpa in his bed. This unites the adult’s and the child’s worlds. The authors use repetition in the text to close the story:

“absolutely no trouble.
No trouble at all.”

Sounds a good read!