Review by New York Times Review
HAVE YOUR KIDS GONE META? Do they Call their neighborhood jungle gym a "play structure"? Do they mix and match their dress-up garb - a tiara here, firefighter's boots there - with a sense of mischief that might, unnervingly, be termed "ironic"? Have they spotted the clown at the neighbor's birthday party removing his wig and slinking out the side door? They're probably not ready for the labyrinthine tricksterism of David Foster Wallace or Spike Jonze. But on the evidence of a recent spate of highly self-conscious picture books, it would seem that the suspended-disbelief state of early childhood is adapting to the wink-wink, nudge-nudge sensibility of our moment. It's not surprising. There has long been a strain of subversion in picture books - think of Maurice Sendak and Tomi Ungerer, among others - alongside the dominant anodyne snuggliness of the form. Now, sophisticated cheekiness appears to have gone mainstream. These five specimens of reinvention deftly pop the bubbles of their own illusory worlds, drawing attention to the artifices of their norms and aiming to teach children to become not just book lovers but pint-size "consumers of text." The best of these books, luckily, manage to find fresh magic in demystification, and to delight kids while spinning the heads of their grown-up companions. The endpapers of "This Book Just Ate My Dog!" by the British writer and illustrator Richard Byrne, are covered with the repeated apology "I promise not to be a naughty book," written out in a simulation of an errant child's scrawl. In its opening spread we find elfin, round-faced, shabby-chic-dressed Bella prancing across the right-hand page, and leading a friendly cow-like dog, situated on the left-facing page, by a leash. "Bella was taking her dog for a stroll across the page when" (turn the page) "something very odd happened." Half the dog vanishes in the space between the two pages - the crease book designers call "the gutter." Odd things do indeed transpire when one reads books. On the next spread, as Bella yanks the leash, the dog disappears entirely. The two sides of the book are not continuous with each other, and Byrne has transformed the fold between them into a kind of portal, emptying to an imagined nether region. All who try to make the crossing - a concerned friend, emergency vehicles, even perplexed Bella - vanish through the book's exposed scaffolding. To set matters straight, the reader is enlisted to twist the irreverent book sideways and shake its characters out of oblivion, a moment of participatory theater that feels like its own bit of naughty fun. "A Perfectly Messed-Up Story," by Patrick McDonnell, also concerned with boundary-breeching, unfolds on classically metafictional terrain. An amorphously shaped, pajama-clad boy named Louie sets out to be a character in an ordinary picture book, "skipping merrily along" and singing "Tra la la," when his path is interrupted by gobs of food descending from an unseen reader. Louie is indignant. "Who would eat a jelly sandwich while reading my book?" As the abuse continues - dirty fingers, orange juice and crayon markers besmirch the page - Louie addresses his condition with world-weary tones of pathos. "I'm just in a messy old book that will end up in some garage sale," he says, in what might be considered a "Toy Story" moment, if not a Brechtian one. The pleasures of watching a book depart from its conventions and address its sticky-fingered reader will tickle even the littlest postmodernist. The peanut butter stains don't hurt. Kelly Bingham and the illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky are on a mission to raise awareness of genre to a level of madcap chicanery. Their first book together, "Z Is for Moose," imagined a collision between a poker-faced alphabet book and a goofy animal romp. This one, "Circle, Square, Moose," purports to be a benign primer in geometry - a "shapes" book - opening with a spot-on parody of a pablum-textured instructional voice. Before long, though, the rambunctious moose trespasses onto the text and tramples its decorum. The comedy is rather broad, but reaches a pitch of surreal delirium as a zebra and a crazed cat join the fray. Adults who have slogged like prisoners through the pieties of self-serious picture books will find the anarchy refreshing; kids will recognize the mash-up world they were born into. B.J. Novak's "The Book With No Pictures" is the most conceptually radical of these books, doing away altogether with the medium's defining element: There's not an illustration to be found here. Novak, a writer and actor best known for his role on "The Office," spoofs the reverent silence of visually lush, text-free books like Tao Nyeu's "Wonder Bear" and Jerry Pinkney's "The Lion and the Mouse," making the refreshing and contrarian case that words alone have sensory and imaginative vibrancy to spare. "It might seem like no fun to have someone read you a book with no pictures," admits a page of black type set against a blinding white background. What's fun, though, is to be let in on trade secrets. "Here is how books work," the confiding typeface continues. "Everything the words say, the person reading the book has to say." An aging semiotician might approve this recognition of the reader's complicity with a book's invisible agenda. For his part, Novak exploits the seeing-through device with abandon. The (presumably adult) reader is made to sing, issue nonsense sounds, extol the superiority of the child who is being read to, and say things like "I am a monkey who taught myself to read" (the favorite moment in my home). It's a raucous and illuminating gag, a formalist free-for-all, even if it wears a bit thin on repeated readings. The main character of "The Jacket," the first picture book by Kirsten Hall and the illustrator Dasha Tolstikova, is named Book. Book is a teal rectangle with soft, wide-apart eyes and a pencil stroke of a smile, uncannily resembling the cover of "The Jacket" itself when the jacket has been removed. This book is a revelation, seamlessly blending the cleverness of its conceit with the virtues of captivating storytelling. Book is lonely until he is discovered by a reader, "the girl," in whose hands he finds his place. Such bliss can't last, though. For "the truth was that there was someone else whom the girl really loved, too" - her dog, Egg Cream, represented as a shaggy blur. Book is nearly put out of commission by his rival, until the girl repairs him through a creative act that completes both Book's jacket and "The Jacket" (the book). It's as poignant as it is smart. The beauty of Tolstikova's pastel-tinged illustrations, whose manner changes from page to page and suggests both childlike simplicity and a quiet mastery of modernist color and design, shows there's more to a book than its concept. MARK LEVINE, a poet, teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Why can't a book about shapes also be about animals? There's no good reason that the irrepressible Moose (last seen in Z Is for Moose, 2012) can think of, so he takes it upon himself, with the help of Zebra and a triangle-eared cat, to liven up the authoritarian narrator's straightforward attempt at teaching concepts. As in Moose, an alphabet book of sorts, the colorful presentation here has a metafictional, tumble-off-the-page layout, although this title's pace is slightly more rambunctious and the concept slightly more contrived. It's certainly no less fun, and even kids who already know their shapes (the target audience, really) may start, in spite of themselves, to buy Moose's attempts to convince everyone that he's a rectangle and makes a better diamond than anything on an old queen's crown. He's just so darn enthusiastic, so who cares that he constantly interrupts the rhyme, and by the time readers learn about curves, things are really tangled up? Nobody, that's who, as by the end, it's clear that Moose is indeed the last shape introduced a star!--Medlar, Andrew Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Having thoroughly disrupted an alphabet book in Z Is for Moose, Bingham and Zelinsky's enthusiastically in-the-way quadruped has his way with a primer on shapes. Bingham gives the unseen narrator a sickly sweet tone, complete with predictable rhymes, though Moose's interruptions (such as eating the sandwich used to demonstrate as a square) quickly raise hackles. "You are ruining the book. This is a book about shap-" begins the narrator, before another new arrival, the referee Zebra from the previous book, pops in, resulting in a metafictional chase that has the animals "crinkling" pages, getting tangled in acres of ribbon, and falling down a hole into a sort of picture-book void. It's wild fun, and adults could probably even use the book to explore shapes with children, if they can get them to stop laughing long enough. Ages 4-8. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-Bingham's irrepressible protagonist from Z Is For Moose (Greenwillow, 2012) and his long-suffering friend Zebra return in this hilarious book about shapes. The offstage narrator begins quite serenely, introducing common shapes represented by everyday objects like a button and a sandwich. When Moose swipes the square but apparently delicious sandwich, the narrator objects but forges ahead to triangles (a wedge of cheese or a piece of pie). Dressed in his striped jersey, Moose cheerfully points out that a cat's ears are also triangular. Unfortunately, this is not a book about animals, and Moose and the feline are asked to leave. Undeterred, Moose continues to insert himself into the following pages showcasing rectangles and diamonds. Suddenly, Zebra, sporting his referee's shirt, appears to handle the situation. Despite Zebra's efforts, Moose and his feline companion continue to barge through the parade of shapes. They dash by a wall of square bathroom tiles and knock over a checkerboard. Eventually, Moose tangles Zebra in a long, curvy ribbon, but they manage to make their escape through a circular hole in the ground. Fed up, the narrator tells them, "You can finish this book YOURSELVES." The friends come up with a gratifying conclusion using Zebra's favorite shape, the star. Zelinsky sets Moose's antics against colorful, geometric backgrounds. He cleverly portrays the characters cavorting in and out of the energetic mixed-media illustrations. For a laugh-filled story hour, pair this title with Doreen Cronin's equally zany Click Clack Moo (S. & S., 2000).-Linda L. Walkins, Saint Joseph Preparatory High School, Boston, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Irrepressible Moose (Z Is for Moose, rev. 3/12) is up to his old tricks, trying to force his way into another concept book. This time the subject is shapes, and at first we seem to be reading an old-school shape book ("that sandwich you had for lunch? That is a...square"). The fun begins on the third page, when Moose appears and takes a bite of the sandwich. An offstage narrator addresses Moose directly--"Hey! Don't eat that!"--in bold-type text. When Moose proves intransigent and ever more disruptive, his old friend Zebra comes to try to save the day. Things grow more and more chaotic until Zebra ends up tangled in the ribbons that illustrate curves; loyal Moose rescues him by turning the sun's shadow (representing circles) into a hole that takes them clear out of the book. As in the first volume, Zelinsky expertly juxtaposes the expected orderliness of a book with the chaos caused by Moose's interruption, but this time he steps up the meta elements. The ending is far from pat, but just as true to the characters as that of the first book. On the back endpapers, we see the same exchange that concluded their previous adventure, but the characters have switched places: "Can we do that again?" asks Zebra. "Yes, Zebra. We can do that again." Adults should be prepared to share this book again and again, as well. lolly robinson (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Moose is back! Hoorayunless you are a book about circles and squares. The simple concept book starts off well enough with a button representing a circle and a sandwich representing a square. And then mischief and mayhem erupt as Moose takes an enormous bite out of the sandwich. Admonitions from the book follow, and then it attempts to continue with a wedge of cheese and a slice of pie to illustrate triangles. Alas, Moose interrupts again, presenting a cat with triangular ears. Leave the book, they are told. More Moose antics ensue with rectangles and diamonds. The book grows ever more frantic, and fortunately Zebra arrives to salvage the exercise. Or does he? Zebra appears hopelessly tangled in ribbon (a curve) when Moose steps in to save the day with a circle that becomes a hole through which they escape the book. Moose then presents his friend with the last shape, a star. It is a great joy to watch Bingham and Zelinsky, who brilliantly collaborated on Z Is for Moose (2012), once more let Moose loose to naughtily and enthusiastically disrupt reading. Bingham's text is both straightforward and filled with humorous speech bubbles. Zelinsky digitally manipulates his palette of bright colors to fill the pages with sly clues, fast-paced action, expressive typefaces and animals with winning personalities. Are further books in Moose's future? Hilarious fun. (Picture book. 4-6) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
