The Three Little Pigs and the
Somewhat Bad Wolf. By Mark Teague. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.
Perfectly Percy. By Paul
Schmid. Harper. $17.99.
Monsters Love Colors. By Mike
Austin. Harper. $15.99.
T-Rex Trying… By Hugh Murphy.
Plume. $13.
Here are four books that the
author/illustrators clearly had a great deal of fun inventing – resulting in
plenty of enjoyment for young readers (ages 4-8) who dip into the creators’
worlds. Mark Teague’s The Three Little Pigs
and the Somewhat Bad Wolf is the umpteenth retelling of the familiar story
of the three pigs who build houses of different materials, here twisted so that
the wolf is misunderstood and harmless and ends up embarrassed and admitting
that he only huffed and puffed because “I was so hungry I could not think
straight.” What sets the plot going here is the decision by a farmer and his
wife to move to Florida: the farmer “paid the pigs for their good work and sent
them on their way.” The first pig loves potato chips and builds a straw house
so he has plenty of money left over for his favorite snack; the second adores
“sody pop” and builds a house of sticks because “sticks are practically free,
so he had lots of money left over for sody-pop.” The third pig – the only girl – is the
practical one who builds a strong brick house and plants a garden, too,
harvesting vegetables instead of consuming junk food (although she is the same
size as the other pigs!). The “somewhat
bad” wolf gets angry after he comes to town and finds restaurant after
restaurant closed to him. By the time he stumbles upon the pigs’ houses, he is really hungry, which is why he tries the
whole huff-and-puff routine. “I can’t believe that worked!” he says after he
blows down the straw house – while the pig speeds away on his scooter. The
second pig gets away on a bicycle after the wolf blows and blows again and is
“amazed” when it works. But of course the technique fails at the brick house,
and the pigs take pity on the exhausted wolf, and the four all end up living in
that house as friends. The wolf “was hardly ever bad again,” Teague writes in
closing a book whose words and pictures alike provide a very pleasant new twist
on a very old story.
Perfectly Percy has a more-prickly protagonist – a porcupine. And
the problem here is not huffing and puffing but popping: Percy loves balloons,
but cannot prevent them from falling victim to his quills. Percy is drawn
adorably: he is almost all quills,
his body is egg-shaped, and he has little black dots for eyes and very short
arms and legs and a completely winning smile. But Percy does have a problem
with those balloons: “HAPPY little porcupines with balloons are soon SAD little
porcupines.” Percy knows he has to come
up with a solution to this problem – “Percy thought he must think,” as Paul
Schmid puts it. But Percy cannot figure out what to do, and his sister, Pearl,
is no help – all she does is stick marshmallows on Percy’s quills, resulting is
an absolutely adorable picture but no answer to the balloon issue. Percy’s mom is too busy to help, so Percy
goes back to thinking on his own, and after a day and night without ideas, he
suddenly comes up with a solution at breakfast. It is a very messy solution, to
be sure, but a hilariously apt one and “a perfectly Percy idea” that young
readers will love (although parents should be sure not to let their kids
imitate Percy too closely).
Speaking of messes, Mike
Austin’s Monsters Love Colors looks
like one from start to finish – there are scribbles and blotches and splats of
color all over every page. It is all the fault of monsters – not very
monstrous-looking ones, but certainly very messy and very colorful ones. The
book is a celebration of colors, primary and mixed, starting with blue, red and
yellow monsters that “mix, dance and wiggle” all over the page while smaller
grey monsters peek at the goings-on. The big monsters first affirm their
choices for favorite colors: red (“the color of ROAR!” and other things),
yellow (“the color of HOWL!” and more), and blue (“the color of Scribble and
Dribble” and so forth). Austin letters his words in different sizes, different
shapes and different places all over the pages, adding to the sense of
monstrous chaos while, in reality, carefully controlling the placement of
everything here. Then the big monsters ask the small ones, one by one, “What
new favorite color can we make for you?” And the small ones, one at a time, ask
for orange, green and purple – which the big monsters create through color
combinations, giving kids reading the book a quick lesson in the world of art
and color amid the general messiness. The smallest grey monster, left for last,
becomes frustrated (“I was supposed
to say PURPLE!”) – but when his turn to pick a color finally comes, he
proclaims what he wants with such intensity and in such large letters that
colors and monsters go flying all over the page, or actually two pages. And then come two further pages
that are filled with mixing and squishing and wiggling and dribbling, until the
smallest monster ends up as – a rainbow!
Part art book, part study in design, part silliness for its own sake, Monsters Love Colors is 100% fun and not
even slightly monstrous, except perhaps for being monstrously delightful.
And why should kids have all
the fun with monsters and colors and silliness? Hugh Murphy’s blog about a sad-sack T. Rex trying
to get along in the modern world has now spawned a book about all the things
this extinct monster is trying to do – everyday things that are simply beyond
the abilities of the “tyrant lizard.”
The problem, in most of Murphy’s concepts and drawings, comes from the
well-known and still-not-understood fact that this gigantic dinosaur had
enormous legs coupled with two tiny, armlike structures, each with only two
claws – structures that appear completely useless, even vestigial, so out of
proportion are they to the rest of the dinosaur’s body. The fun of Murphy’s
book, whose drawings are black and white with a small splash of red or pink to
draw attention to one element or another, comes from imagining T. Rex trying to
contort his body to do things that we puny humans take for granted. Pick
flowers? How, with that huge body and
those tiny arms? Count to five? But the “arms” have only four fingers between
them. Do a cartwheel? Out of the question. Serve himself food from a salad bar
with a sneeze guard? Pull down the trap-door cord to get into the attic? Use a
drive-through ATM or a public restroom’s hand dryer? Everything is pitifully and very amusingly
impossible – there is no way the small arms and bulky body can possibly go
together for cross-country skiing, pulling a parachute’s ripcord, playing the
bongos, flossing, playing the flute… The
list goes on and on, amusingly and sometimes hilariously, as Murphy manages to
make T. Rex’s face just expressive enough to convey a mixture of frustration
and resignation. Not all the drawings work – some rely simply on the dinosaur’s
body size, such as “trying to play hide & seek,” and are not especially funny.
But some are gems, such as one showing T. Rex struggling to ride a motorcycle
or a bicycle – then succeeding with a unicycle (which has no handlebars) – and
then facing frustration again when trying to pump up the unicycle’s tire. The wholly unrealistic and wholly ridiculous
modern-world antics of this long-gone apex predator are those of a monster for
our own time – one that modern life has cut down to size.
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