ABSTRACT
The endless debate about how children’s books should end has primarily focused on the psychological and emotional fulfi lment of expectations. However, little has been said about the cognitive mechanisms that challenge readers to strive for meaning as they reach the end of a story. We believe that a description of the patterns as well as the textual and graphic strategies which characterize surprise endings in picturebooks can allow us to go deeper into defi ning levels of complexity according to the type of cognitive functions that twist endings can trigger. Therefore, in this chapter we will look at several picturebooks to study the forms, effects, and implications of surprise endings. We will attempt to show how the patterns of concealment and revelation appear in the narrative, and how the interplay of text, image, and the physical dimension of picturebooks can help children develop both their narrative thinking and their understanding of how a work of art creates meaning. We will draw parallels with cinema in order to illustrate more clearly what these narratives, which also use images to convey meaning, and to share. This will allow us differentiate those elements which only appear in picturebook narratives.
