Stuck with the Blooz. By
Caron Lewis. Illustrated by Jon Davis. Harcourt. $16.99.
Sleep Like a Tiger. By Mary
Logue. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Houghton Mifflin. $16.99.
One of these books
starts with a little girl in bed and the others ends with one there, and both
deal with the ups and downs of everyday life – and some creative ways of
handling them. But there the
resemblances end. Caron Lewis’s Stuck with the Blooz not only has a very
Seussian title but also comes with some remarkably Seussian digitally painted
illustrations by Jon Davis. Not that
this is a tribute to Dr. Seuss, at least overtly – but the notion of
translating “feeling blue” into a creature called the Blooz is one that recalls
the good doctor. And the idea that the creature
cannot be kept out by a very determined-looking little girl – but insists on
tromping through the house, leaving squishy blue footprints everywhere, and
being “very big and very wet and very blue” – is a Seussian one as well. The huge-nosed, oversize Blooz, which looks
slightly like one of Al Capp’s Shmoos (but with a downcast expression),
dribbles into the girl’s chocolate milk and squeezes into her lemonade – and if
there were ever a perfect metaphor for just feeling blue, this dribbling is
it. The determined girl, her posture and
gestures and expressions reminiscent of those of Dr. Seuss’s characters, asks
the Blooz questions to try to get rid of it – and, in another Seussian touch,
one question is accompanied by a picture of an upside-down goldfish that looks
downright imitative. The lesson here,
which the girl learns bit by bit, is that you cannot talk the Blooz away,
cannot feed the Blooz away, cannot tempt the Blooz with a blanket or pillow:
“It just sat there, large and lumpy.” The
girl eventually just accepts having the Blooz, slinks into her room with the
creature (in identical postures), and hides (with the Blooz) under her
bed. Then, gradually, she starts to do
things – painting a picture, going outside to collect leaves, kicking the dirt,
riding her bike – and slowly, although the Blooz is still there, the girl’s
expression changes, becoming happier and more focused, until the bike hits a
bump and the Blooz flies off, into the air, merging into “the brightest, bluest
day” with a clear and beautiful sky. A
book that teaches brilliantly by not seeming to teach at all, Stuck with the Blooz has Seussian
sensibilities, for sure, but its mixture of sensitive writing and wonderfully
apt art makes it a joy in its own right.
The art in Sleep Like a Tiger, which includes
computer illustrations plus mixed-media paintings on wood, is immensely
appealing as well: Pamela Zagarenski’s illustrations are fun to look at even
without reading Mary Logue’s text. But
they complement the text very well, too.
The story is a simple one about a little girl who is just not sleepy –
apparently a princess, given the crown she wears, the ones her parents wear as
well, and the book The Little Prince
that her mother holds on one page. The
parents, whether really royal or imagined to be, move things ahead bit by bit:
it is all right not to sleep, but put on pajamas; wash your face; brush your
teeth; climb into bed. Still not sleepy,
the girl asks whether everything sleeps, and her parents say yes, talking about
the family dog and cat, and bats and whales, and snails and bears. Then the
girl thinks about a tiger sleeping in the jungle; and then her parents leave
the room (keeping the door open a crack) and say it is all right if the girl
stays awake all night if she wants to. So
the girl thinks about how animals sleep – dog, cat and so on – and by the time
she thinks about the tiger, she falls asleep herself. The story is lovingly told, and the illustrations,
particularly those of the whales, are beautifully done and fit the
real-but-dreamlike milieu exactly as they should. This is a lovely bedtime book, with parents
who handle the “I’m not sleepy” routine just the right way, and a little girl
who learns how to put herself to sleep – and can teach the technique to other
non-sleepy children who become involved in the story.
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