The spoon’s best-known role in the annals of children’s literature is as the dish’s paramour. But the spoon can be more than a consort. In Amy Krause Rosenthal’s classic tale of identity crisis, the titular implement has thoughts and feelings. (Spoon wants to be a fork.) It is exceedingly rare, however, for this most well-rounded of utensils to be considered not a character with agency but an object to use — you know, like a spoon. In part that’s because we tend to remake everything in our own image, as if it’s somehow comforting — rather than terrifying — to think of spoons (and sausages and scissors and seeds) as sentient. It’s also infinitely more difficult to craft a narrative around a soulless, spoony spoon: humble, edgeless, concave, mute.

What makes THE SPOON (Crocodile Books, 40 pp., $14.95, ages 5 to 7), a newly translated picture book by the Argentine writer Sandra Siemens, so admirable is that its spoon is just an object. No cute eyes or twiggy limbs or jaunty smile. The tension of the story isn’t what the spoon can do but what one can do with the spoon.

The answer, in this case, is not much. This spoon is a small silver one, a wedding gift brought by the young protagonist’s great-grandmother to a new country after an unnamed war. And as the girl learns, the spoon’s uses are now proscribed: It’s not meant to stir soup, dig holes or make music. It’s so precious it must be kept sequestered in a drawer and admired — robbed, therefore, of its spooniness. For the child, unfreighted by the ossifying tendencies of intergenerational trauma and the paralysis of accumulated meaning, this sucks. “I don’t think I want a spoon like that,” she says, “a spoon that’s not to be used.”

Despite the Corporate-Memphis-style illustrations by Bea Lozano, which one could imagine on a mural in the lobby of a tech startup, “The Spoon” is remarkably profound. What use is an object? How do we balance the weight of the past with the desires of the present? What do we owe to the stories that brought us here? Siemens manages to pose these questions in simple, spare language. “It reminds me of a shell that carries the sounds of the sea,” she writes. “I put the spoon to my ear, but it’s quiet. For now, it doesn’t have anything to say.” Thankfully, that’s not the case with the book. It’s an elegant and wise work, capable of delivering oceans of meaning in easily consumed spoonfuls.

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From “The Table.” Credit...Jason Griffin

An object’s uses and history are also at the center of THE TABLE (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 56 pp., $19.99, ages 4 to 8), the wildly creative new picture book from Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illustrated by Jason Griffin. Bingham, whose first book, “Soul Food Sunday,” was a colorful evocation of a cookout, here turns to Appalachia, to which she immigrated from Jamaica when she was a child. Blevins, meanwhile, is an early reading specialist and serial children’s author who comes from a family of coal miners in West Virginia.

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