Wonder, part 2

Yesterday I wrote a "review" of R.J. Palacio's Wonder wherein I was trying to work out what I was thinking on the fly, on the screen, sorting out my thoughts in public. even as I was committing the post to go public I was still left with the feeling that I hadn't really scratched the surface. I've been trying to stay as close to gut-level in my reactions while at the same time shortening my reviews to something a little more manageable; people respond better to shorter reviews, or so I've been told, and anecdotal reader response tends to bear this out.

What I realized during the day was that I hadn't really discussed the book itself, in particular the elements of craft that impressed me, and perhaps an examination of how the book falls into the mold of a potential "classic" by virtue of possessing a certain quality that, for lack of a better term, I simply call award-bait. I don't mean that in a mean way, there are just some books that have a tone and feel that sits just above all others in such a way that they attract the attention of people who give awards for noteworthy books. 

I have to admit, the reason I'm coming to this book so late from all the hoopla of its initial release is that I've found more and more I find the hoopla surrounding a book's release tends to be a distraction. I wanted to get to a point where I couldn't really remember what I'd heard in order to delve into the book with fresh eyes. I'm glad I did because there were some nice surprises in store.

First, Augie Pullman has a great voice. He's optimistic yet realistic. He knows his deficits but underneath he's just a kid with the same worries as other kids entering middle school: Will he be able to make new friends? Will there be any kids as into Star Wars as him?

Will these kids stare and make fun of him the way other kids have his entire life?

That Augie discusses his facial deformities and surgical procedures with a detached boredom doesn't remove the fact that emotionally he knows he trapped behind this mask forever. He knows he'll never be normal but that doesn't stop him for wanting, just once, to be treated for who he really is and not what he looks like... and certainly not out of pity. Palacio finds a nice, light touch for Augie's voice, a balance that straddles his inner and outer worlds.

The biggest, and most welcome, surprise comes when the point-of-view shifts. I realize I've just gone ahead and made it so someone wanting to read with fresh eyes as I did will now have to wait until they have forgotten this review, but such is the nature/danger or reading and writing reviews.

The shift in POV solves a problem with most first-person narratives in that it gives the reader insight to the other characters Augie interacts with, and in particular provides elements of the story Augie couldn't possibly know. This is a great trick because it retains the intimacy of Augie's world and provides background and depth without either diluting or undermining his perceptions. His saintly sister Via enters high school and goes through an emotional roller coaster of emotions that Augie cannot fathom. Nor can his parents, it seems, and it isn't until we hear Via's own take on events that we learn that her sacrifice has come with a price. This shift happens again when his new friend Jack Will cannot figure out why Augie is giving him the cold shoulder (but the reader knows), and when Via's boyfriend plays a small role in undermining a bully at Augie's school, and when his friend Summer chronicles their work on a Science project. The effect is a bit like a documentary where the narrative shifts according to which person has the most insight into an event. It works because, as with Augie's voice, it is carefully crafted and not gimmicky.

As I hinted at yesterday, the one false note is the ending, which isn't so much deus ex machina as it feels too good to be true. And by that I mean that what makes it untrue is that it quite simply is too good. Too good in the sense that Augie's soaring triumph at his middle school seems to set him up in a way that is potentially dangerous for him down the road. If it sounds like I'm concerned for the imaginary future of a fictional character, I am, because in order to buy the rest of Augie's story I have to care enough about him to not want him given a false hope. Yes, I want uplifting, but I also want honest, and it matters in a story like this. Everything about Augie and his world has been rendered in a realistic and unflinching manner, and then comes an award ceremony that doesn't simply elevate his self-esteem but paints an entire school as having been moved by Augie's humanity. The totality of this communal change elevates Augie's personal moment to something that, to my sense, felt slightly messianic. Augie is a special boy, indeed, but is he really that special?

Without digging up the reviews I so carefully avoided or deliberately forgot, the hoopla for Wonder is deserved, but with the caveat that the book serve as a point of discussion for young readers and decidedly not as a lesson. There is nothing more I hate than watching a solid book with a unique character used to club innocent children over the head with the weight of heavy-handed moralizing and guilt-inducing pity.

Which, sadly, tends to happen with books that get little gold or silver medals affixed to their covers.

Wonder

by R.J. Palacio
Knopf 2012 

Can a boy with a deformed face find friends, happiness, success, and acceptance when he first goes to middle school? Only in a middle grade novel. 

I'm going to lean a little heavy on this book, despite the fact that I found the writing and narrative structure compelling and well crafted. Bear with me, I'm thinking aloud.

There are buses and billboards and junk mail that I see fairly regularly with pictures of a kid with a cleft lip or cleft palate coupled with an appeal for me to do something to help the poor child pictured. I hate these ads because not because of their appeal to help children but because they do so by attempting to guilt us into giving by trying to shock us into a politically incorrect place. We are so used to beautiful images of people in ads that when we see a child with a disfigured face our initial reaction (according to the psychology behind the ad) is to cause us to reel in horror and then instantly feel bad about having that response; if this were not true they wouldn't put the photo in the ads. These images force us to to look away, then look back with pity, and finally assuage our guilt via a donation. It isn't charity so much as penance for our thought crimes.

August "Augie" Pullman, the narrator of Wonder, is the photo in these ads times ten. It's the combination of two separate medical conditions that has disfigured Augie's face, a one-in-million set of circumstances, made only slightly better through dozens of surgeries in his twelve years on the planet. Due to his constant need for care and recovery from surgeries Augie has been home-schooled but his parents believe the time has come for him to be mainstreamed, to get a solid education and learn how to deal with the realities that life is going to dish out to him over time.

Mind you, Augie is perfectly normal in every other respect, and is the kind of whip-smart kid that is part-and-parcel of most middle grade stories. But where most protagonists have a goal placed before them Augie's is simply handed to him and his best hope is simply to cope. He is given the option of baking out of going to school, but without saying it Augie knows that he would essentially be choosing a lifetime of house arrest, so there isn't much of a choice.

Augie is used to kids recoiling in horror at his face, he's used to the brutal honesty of kids who speak their minds without intending to be mean, wounding him all the same. Inside he's just a kid like the rest of them but its the outside world that must bend to meet Augie half way. And as entertaining and heartwarming as all this is, it was about the halfway point that I started to wonder...

In the early 1960s this story could have been about the one black kid in an all-white Southern school. In the early 1990s this could have been about a kid with AIDS coming to school. The first girl in an all-boys prep. These stories all fit the mold of a kid who is different bringing people closer to understanding their "issue" while growing themselves in gaining acceptance. It all started to leave a bad taste in my mouth, like the waxy coating after eating a donut that tasted good at first and then suddenly not so much so.

My thoughts continued to drift as I read. I remembered The Elephant Man (which later is referenced in Wonder) about Joseph Merrick, a victim of his own deformities who lived in the much less forgiving Victorian England. Or was it? Merrick, despite his outward physical appearance and limitations, left school to earn a living in the workhouses of the time, and despite the story of his being a sort of sideshow freak who was taken advantage of, Merrick actively sought out this lifestyle. A shy and withdrawn man who once dreamed of meeting a blind woman who could love him because she couldn't see him, by comparison Augie didn't seem to have it so bad. Little Augie may have been taunted as a Zombie or the butt of a middle school joke called the Plague, but fat and gay kids are taunted and bullied far worse than anything Augie experiences.

So while Augie had to put up with betrayal by his closest friend and deal with older kids from another school giving him a beat-down, he also had at least one girl friend who could see beyond the surface, and eventually the return of his best friend after a little time-in-the-wilderness guilt and anxiety over some overheard comments. In many ways Augie's deformities are almost irrelevant to the story. He is sweet and charming, and after a while it was as if his face hardly seemed to be deformed at all. Not because we were see the real Augie beneath the surface but because the surface became unrealistic by virtue of the story's commonplace events.

In a story like this, a kid like Augie should triumph, but his stakes need to be exponentially higher than "normal" kids. By the end of Wonder it's as if the entire school (save one bully type) have turned and been won over by Augie. In one school year he went from zero to hero, as they say, but the notes are so high at the end that suddenly it becomes clear Augie's in for a lifetime of letdown. He's survived his first year of middle school and... it's all downhill from here. He might have been mainstreamed to the point of acceptance (not quite normal) but he'll never have a year as spectacular as the one in this book (no character could) and, when I think about it, its kind of sad.

Yes, of course, the point is that by the end the world sees Augie as "normal" and he can (theoretically) continue to have the normal sort of adventures most kids have... but in the real world? In the real world kids who start Wonder will try to align themselves with others in the book who recoiled in horror then came to accept him as just a good-natured, Star Wars-addicted kid with nerdy tendencies, but like those bus and junk mail ads, it comes at the expense of the reader's internal guilt. For 320 pages they have been shown how time and again Augie's face has shaped the reactions of people inside and outside the book, and the happy ending is the penance paid to let the reader off the hook.

See, everything worked out okay for Augie in the end, so don't beat yourself up over the fact that initially you realized you wouldn't have behaved so kindly if you'd met him for the first time.

Young readers will put the book down, grateful the visit to Augie's world was only a short one. They will convince themselves they learned a great lesson and may themselves be changed by it (if they can be that honest with themselves), but once the book is closed it's no difference then send a check to the people who paid for the cleft palate ads.

Out of sight, out of mind, guilt paid off in full.

Who Need Donuts?

Story and Pictures by Mark Alan Stamaty  
Knopf 1973     

Sam wants donuts for his birthday, more donuts than his parents could ever afford.  He wanders from his suburban home to the big city and discovers there are some things more important that donuts.  

Once Sam hits the city he finds a man named Mr. Bikferd who is a donut collector, wandering the city hunting for donuts and hauling them all over in his giant wagon.  Sam tags along helping collect donuts until one day the wagon breaks down.  Seeking help, Sam locates a woman who collects pretzels in a wagon of her own, and when Pretzel Annie and Mr. Bikferd lock eyes it's all over for the donut collector.  Sam now has a wagon full of all the donuts he could ever want... and he doesn't want them.  

Popping up throughout is a sad old woman whose prophetic announcement at the beginning of Sam's adventure – "Who needs donuts when you have love?" – finds her life in danger when the coffee company above her sad little basement apartment encounters a runaway bull and coffee spills everywhere.  But it's Sam and his donuts to the rescue, and the realization that, indeed, there are some things more important than donuts.  

Stamaty, an illustrator who for many years wrote the alternative political cartoon in the Village Voice called Washingtoon, crams so much information into his line drawings a reader could easily spend hours on each page studying what is there to find.  Absurd conversations, surreal animals, people whose fashion defies logic, there are more visual treasures to find per square inch than any other books except maybe Where's Waldo and Waldo is tame by comparison. Picture book readers of varying ages will discover different gags in the illustrations depending on experience.  Newspapers bare headlines like "Convicted Felon Receives Paragraph From Verbose Judge" probably play more to adults who would get the puns, but visual gags like a Conestoga wagon being driven by a horse in a suit who is a passenger in a convertible are accessible for all.  

(I do believe you can get an approximate sense of the experience by double clicking on the image above for a larger size.)

What does any of this have to do with the story?  Nothing.  At least on the surface.  These jam-packed illustrations serve as a parallel charm to the book's otherwise simple message that sometimes wanting something can sometimes blind you to what you already have or what you might really want.  It's no mistake that all of this takes place in a hectic city full of people who are blindly going about their business, oblivious to the wonders of the crazy world around them, including an obliviousness to love.  

Out of print for a long time, Who Needs Donuts? was reprinted in 2003 and can still be found. 

Erroll

by Hannah Shaw
Knopf 2010

You expect me to believe that if a kid found a live rodent in his snack food that he'd befriend it until his mother told him to get rid of it? Seriously?

Sometimes I think I take picture books a little too seriously, a little too literally. Sometimes I forget that I have put on my picture book kid hat, a hat that sometimes sits casually on my head at a goofy angle and sometime sits tight and low and uncomfortable. It's a hat I sometimes forget I'm wearing, and at other times I toss with anger and disgust. And sometimes, when what I'm reading really puzzles me, I scratch my head and the picture book hat falls off.

The book opens with a boy named Bob finding a squirrel in his package of nuts. When the squirrel speaks in surprise, and introduces himself as Erroll, Bob figures he must be special and immediately does what he can to make Erroll comfortable in his new home. Bob does spend half a second trying to imagine how Erroll might have ended up in the package, but beyond that he's willing to accept this animal visit like a toy surprise inside his breakfast cereal.

Now, to be honest, I can partly relate. When I was in kindergarten I asked if I could create a squirrel home in the closet under the stairs that was underused. I promised to find a tree and build a nice home for it but was stumped by the questions I was asked when I was being humored: How would the squirrel get sunlight? What would it do during the day while I was at school? Where, living in a city and having never ever seen a squirrel in my life, did I plan to get a live squirrel from? Details, details. Clearly my mom wasn't buying the right kind of nuts from the store.

Eventually the squirrel causes enough havoc that mom forces Bob to release Erroll to the wild (and presumably she then goes in search of a lawyer to sue the manufacturer for nearly giving her kid rabies) leaving us with the twist at the end: What's inside the Chewy Crunchy Monkey Munchy breakfast cereal box? Whoa! You mean to tell me live animals inside packaged food are so common in this picture book world that it happens all the time! Quick! More legislation and food regulators! Think of the children, and create more jobs for the sagging economy at the same time!

Sorry, the picture book hat fell off again. I wish I could see past the casual animal-in-food-for-children element and find some sort of goofy fun in this picture book, but I can't. I can't even get into the illustrations as they are fussy and crowded with unnecessary details, occasionally with colors close to those of the main characters, making it difficult to know where to focus your eye on the page. It isn't an I Spy so much as a Where's Waldo situation, only in this case it's Where's Erroll and that's a problem.

Final nail: A little kid saying the name Erroll sounds a bit like "error," which maybe isn't far from the mark.

Powerless

by Matthew Cody
Knopf 2009

Fish-out-of-water helps mutant teens battle evil using wits over brawn.

Daniel's new to Noble's Green, "The Safest Town on Earth," but it doesn't take him long to figure out why: the place is crawling with pre-teen superheroes who use their powers for good and not evil. And by crawling I mean half a dozen kids. And they don't know how they got their powers. And their powers disappear when they turn thirteen.

Sounds a little like Savvy in reverse.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and where there are superpowers there is super evil scheming to bring them down. And once these teen mutants (no copyright infringement intended, I'm sure) have taken ordinary, superpowerless Daniel into their confidence you just know it will fall to him and his superior intellect to do what might and force cannot.

Yawn.

I'm beginning to suspect that the reason superhero novels for kids keep getting published is that they appear high-concept, and thus easier to market than "human" stories, while at the same time playing with (tired) metaphors of good and evil, teamwork, puberty, what-have-you. But these stories are all, almost without exception, as dull as dried toast and as nutritionally empty as a withered celery stalk.

As always, if you want superhero stories, you're better off with comics.

Lunch Lady

...and the Cyborg Substitute
...and the League of Librarians
written and illustrated by Jarret J. Krosoczka
Alfred A. Knopf 2009

There's evil afoot, and Lunch Lady is there with her trusty hair-netted sidekick Betty to thwart it. Whether its a league of librarians who plan to intercept all the new video game consoles coming in fresh off he boat, or the mild-mannered teacher who created a robot army to replace the other teachers so he can become Teacher of the Year, Lunch Lady and her never-ending arsenal of modified food service devices will be there to save the day.

These graphic novels aimed at the emerging reader has just enough story to keep them moving along and plenty of action to retain the attention of the fussiest readers, but little else. They have a look and feel reminiscent of the the Babymouse series, though they lack that series more rounded characters. The trio of kids - the Breakfast Bunch - are convenient shells for explaining story elements and become useful only when they fall into danger. Lunch Lady (and Betty) should be the focus and we should know more about what makes them tick.

Similarly, this series also makes a play for the Captain Underpants crowd with the wackiness of superheros but are neither as clever in their humor or as gross as they could be. We are talking about cafeteria food here, a prime area for exploration, and it feels little like an opportunity lost that crime if fought only with the utensils. Also, superheroes have backstories that explain and infuse character. Captain Underpants himself is funny because of how he becomes who he is, but with Lunch Lady the reader is supposed to accept her antics simply by virtue of lunch ladies being somewhat off.

I appreciate the idea of producing more long-form comics for this age group but I feel that with kids a certain standard has to be met. I'm not suggesting that the stories can't be fun and frivolous, but that they be delivered with the same expectations that would fall to a work of fiction aimed at the same level. What makes Captain Underpants work with readers isn't that it has underpants in the title, it's that the characters are distinctly drawn, the text is clever and funny, and the story would be almost as funny without illustrations. There's a whole load of possibility in the concept of a superhero Lunch Lady but it's all lost on just-in-time gadgets and one-dimensional characters.

I found that the moment I closed the book I had forgotten most of its story. The same thing happened on rereading them. There is so little to latch onto that they are as immediately forgotten as the empty calories of a celery stalk.

To steal from Douglas Adams: relatively harmless.

The Spectacular Now

by Tim Tharp
Knopf 2008

(cross-posting today at Guys Lit Wire)

It's an odd, almost unsettling experience to finish reading a book, fire up the internet to see what sort of buzz the book has, and then discover that almost simultaneously the book was just named as a finalist for the National Book Award. That's exactly what happened a few weeks back, in one of those moments when you wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something important.

Cue eerie music.

Sutter Keely is a charmer. A senior without a care, he is an unrepentant alcoholic living in the now, willing to embrace the weird. The only problem is that his beautiful fat girlfriend Cassidy is getting tired of his shtick. He's late and constantly drinking Seagam's and 7-Up; he's fun but irresponsible; he's a good time at parties but he's selfish. When the last straw comes and Cassidy finally dumps him Sutter figures she'll eventually come back around to his wannabe Dean Martin swagger.

The problem is that Cassidy is looking down the road at life beyond high school and Sutter isn't there. And not just Cassidy, all of Sutter's friends seem intent on trying to figure out what comes next. After years of floating without a care Sutter doesn't see the big deal, or the need to plan beyond his current buzz. So when Cassidy shows how serious she is by picking up with a new boyfriend, Sutter redirects his energies toward hooking up his best friend Ricky with a girl of his own.

Wallowing drunk, he is found passed out on a lawn early one morning by Aimee, one of those withdrawn girls everyone walks all over. Taking her on as his own special project to help her grow a spine and realize her inner self, Sutter finds himself promising to take her to the prom, officially declaring her his girlfriend, and knowingly leads her on in an effort to build self esteem. But Aimee isn't like the other girls he's dated, willing to hang out with a party boy until it's no longer fun. Aimee has fallen in love -- deep, hard, and seriously -- and slowly begins to entangle Sutter into her plans and dreams, into their combined future together. She could be the girl Sutter has always needed, the one he never realizes he'd always wanted, a girl who could change him for the better.

If Sutter doesn't first succeed in dragging her into his own dead-end spiral.

Will Sutter reform, confront his deadbeat father and clean up his drinking? Or will Aimee become his sloppy, drunken sidekick, the girl who abandons her dreams of college and NASA to stay by the side of the only guy that has ever bothered to give her the time of day?

Up until the final pages there's no way of knowing how this is going to turn out. Tharp does a nice job of having the characters remain true to themselves in such a way that every meeting is a quiet trial of wills. When Cassidy continues to get together with Sutter on Thursday afternoons after they break up -- and with the full knowledge of their new dating partners -- Cassidy makes no bones about the fact that she will probably always be drawn to Sutter's bad boy antics but cannot let him back into her life as anything more than a buddy. This suits Sutter just fine, but his unspoken longing for Cassidy seeps in and pushes him that much farther along. He's like a comet that gains velocity in her orbit, then spins wildly out into the universe seemingly with a lack of control, but he's always drawn back into her gravitational orbit when he reaches the outer limits with Aimee.

Tharp pulls a nifty trick in giving us the portrait of a charming young drunk well on his way toward becoming a pathetic one. But he doesn't judge -- Sutter's friends are more than willing to do that, and they do it with a large dose of tough love despite the apparent futility of their gestures. There were moments when I was almost afraid Tharp was romanticizing teen alcoholism in trying to present a realistic portrait, but Sutter's own aimlessness undermines anything remotely cool about being drunk. It plays as humor when Sutter goes to his sister's house for dinner and nearly sets himself on fire when he tries to secretly smoke a joint in her closet, but Sutter's empty apologies and quick judgments about his family members make the laughter ring hollow.

I wasn't as impressed with Tharp's last outing, The Knights of Hill Country, because there was something about it that felt stale. This time out Tharp returns to his Oklahoma soil with an approach that feels slightly on edge. Not edgy, but teetering at the brink of excess and charm -- much like its main character. It is unflinching in its handing of teen drinking, almost casual, but equally sober about what sort of dead end that leads to.

I don't think it's necessarily undeserving the National Book Award, but given the competition I'm having a hard time seeing this pull through as the winner. Then again, perhaps the universe was indeed trying to tell me something. We'll find out soon enough.

Whale

by David Lucas
Knopf 2007
(Andersen Press, UK 2006)

Huh?

A frolicking whale accidentally beaches himself atop a port town in the night, waking the townfolk. As they climb on top of the the whale they begin to wonder what to do about the situation. Seeing as the whale is too large to be moved a suggestion is made (and agreed upon by the whale itself) that it should be hacked up for a stew.

"No!" shouts young Joe, the first to discover the whale outside his bedroom window.

Soon everyone is asking the wisest of the wise -- an owl -- what should be done. The owl suggests asking the winds, who in turn ask the sun and moon, who in turn as the stars for a solution (it's all verbal, there are no pictures of all this asking, unfortunately). Finally word comes back that they townfolk are to sing the rain song.

"But that never works!" Nonetheless they sing it.

Soon the rains come and flood the town, sending the whale back into the sea. It also totally floods the town away. A grateful whale begins singing a song himself, a fish song, and soon all sorts of marine life come to shore with shells and pearls and shiny pebbles to rebuild the town much prettier than before. With everyone happy the whale departs promising to come back some day.

This is the second book of Lucas' I've read (of three, see Nutmeg for my other take) and it's clear to me that his sense of picture book storytelling is "unusual." That's one of them code words, like the way "interesting" when used for art generally means "I don't like it." It isn't that I don't like Lucas' books -- no, I want to like them -- but they always end with me feeling like something is missing. The problem is in trying to figure out what is missing because his stories tend to operate in their own worlds and by their own rules, with little in the way of clues to help impose some sense of order.

In this story our main character, beside the whale, is a boy named Joe. We learn nothing about Joe other than he doesn't want to see the whale destroyed. That's not much in the way of character, and he has so little else to say or do in this book, so why even give him a name at all? And the whale, so quick to give up and allow the townfolk to hack him into a stew... what's up with that? Sending the owl on a mission to find the answer is fine but, as I mentioned, the asking up the chain-of-command is all verbal and fits on a single spread.

It's odd, if you look at the book without reading the words you can almost piece together a story on your own. It makes me wonder if Lucas doesn't actually do this, write the story after the illustrations are finished. That doesn't sound likely, but it might explain the quirkiness of what is written.

Lucas has a nice watercolor and pen-bleed style and a very identifiable style. His books are fun to look at and it's apparent that he likes stories set near water. All that's missing are stories that transcend "unusual" and become "unique."

Edwardo, The Horriblest Boy in the Whole World

by John Burningham
Knopf 2007

Here's a picture book with a troubling message at the end that may, in fact, not be for children at all but for adults.

Edwardo is a boy. Like some troublesome boys he makes messes, is noisy, acts aggressive. When he makes noise he is the noisiest boy in the world. Or so says an adult. And when he makes a mess he is the messiest boy in the world. So says another adult. And when he acts out, clutters his room, pulls a prank there is an adult nearby to tell Edwardo that he is the ultimate in whatever bad behavior he produces.

Then he kicks a flower pot out of aggression and an adult remarks that he is good with growing things and he becomes a gardener. And when Edwardo tosses a bucket of water on a dog he is seen by an adult as being good with animals and becomes a pet groom. And when he pushes another boy, instead of being seen as an aggressor, he is a hero for moving the downed boy out of the way of a falling object.

All of this makes for great commentary on how children behave when they are labeled except that none of the "good" things Edwardo is recognized for is intentional. The boy is not transformed into the best boy in the world wide world as the text would suggest, only that the majority of opinion has been changed. So there's your lesson. A boy can be a terror, a bully, a slob but as long as he gets positive reinforcement everything will be okay.

Except for the fact that that kind of thinking doesn't work.

A child who is praised as being creative for, say, setting toys on fire gets the message that perhaps the same would happen when setting the neighbors cat on fire. I will grant that adults far too often are quick to pronounce children as being something as definitive as the worst child in the world over simple things, and that a life of such constant labeling ruins a child's self esteem, but the opposite approach does not right the wrongs. To overlook bad behavior and reinforce it through reverse psychology allows for the continuation of the bad behavior to the point where it becomes uncorrectable.

No, sir, no, ma'am, I don't like it.

I think adults might get the message, but the ones who really need to get the message -- those who can only offer criticism to children -- are unlikely to actually get the message, so I'm at a loss for who this book is best suited for. Perhaps if Edwardo were being scolded by other children we'd get to see a message about perception and labeling in a way that would allow for dialog among younger children who are just ripe for understanding these lessons. Otherwise I think this is a miss.

I also have to mention the artwork, a ragged almost sketchy style of line that seems far from Burningham's earlier work that either speaks to his advanced age or a lack of concern. In page after page Edwardo's features and proportions change sufficiently enough that the character is nearly unrecognizable as the Edwardo that came before. There is a fine line between the charm of the naive -- the work of Edward Lear, for example -- and the work of an otherwise accomplished illustrator. I guess I just found the whole package off-putting.