My Baby Crocodile

Klinger’s translation is skillful, and the story has the scale and gravity of a novel. Is this love or detente? It’s for readers to decide.

– Publishers Weekly

Told from two different perspectives, My Little Crocodile is a picture book about a chance meeting between an old crocodile and what he believes to be a baby crocodile. But the baby the old crocodile thinks he sees is rather a small boy wearing a knight’s costume, and it’s his helmet that deceives the croc’s old eyes. By the time the error is corrected and the boy’s true nature is revealed, the two characters have become close–close enough to play together well and to learn to eat each other’s foods, or at least to taste them! This is an imaginative, poignant, gorgeously illustrated story of a lonely child who discovers both tenderness and profound complexity within his playmate, and within himself, of course, as well. Eventually, they part ways with a hug. Quite wonderfully, however, the young knight continues to carry the old crocodile within himself as he grows up, as the story’s end reveals.

For older children and young adults, this is a story about how we negotiate the different aspects of our own selfhood, how we become conversant with them, and become ourselves through acceptance of contradictions, both within and outside of ourselves.

Born in 1971, Gaetan Doremus received his degree from the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg, France in 1999, after which he picked up a few other degrees while creating picture books and illustrations for the press. Doremus has illustrated over twenty books and has produced hundreds of editorial illustrations and cartoons. He loves to bicycle ride, walk in the mountains, and eat green tomatoes with cinnamon. In 2006, he became a papa.