Can Reading About Trauma Help Kids Cope?

Do children’s books about frightening events make the very young more afraid, or do they comfort them?

THE MANGO TREE (Abrams, 48 pp., $18.99, ages 4 to 8), by Edel Rodriguez, author of the graphic memoir “Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey,” begins happily enough. Its opening pages are a succession of vibrant, stylized images in ruby red, dandelion yellow, harlequin green and turquoise blue that show an island, at first in the distance, far away from the ocean’s fantastical, writhing sea monsters; then closer up, a junglelike Eden brimming with flora and fauna — with a potted, perfectly round mango tree, in which two boys play, at its heart.

The mango tree is everything to the friends, both home and haven. They swing from its branches and fly kites from its top, all the while eating mangoes and drinking mango juice, and taunt the island’s horned, fanged beasts from a place of safety high above.

But a storm comes, as storms inevitably do, and the world turns menacingly monochromatic.

One of the boys is swept out to sea with the tree, its pot becoming his lifeboat. The boy, the tree, a dove they’d raised amid its boughs, and a lone mango travel the monster-infested ocean until they reach another shore.

This island, too, is filled with technicolor plants and animals, but these are different. Alien.

There are people here as well — blue people — and they welcome him. With their help, the boy plants his mango in a new pot. Soon there is a new mango tree, something familiar among all these strange and beautiful things.

Rodriguez’s vivid, woodblock-printing-style illustrations had me marveling at how a simple shape becomes a leaf, a kite, a fin, a house.