March 07, 2019

(++++) FUN IN RHYME, TIME AFTER TIME


Sheep in a Jeep 5-Minute Stories. By Nancy Shaw. Illustrated by Margot Apple. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $12.99.

I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More! By Karen Beaumont. Illustrated by David Catrow. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.

     Few things are worse
     In prose or verse
     Than a once-neat story
     Now past its glory:
     Tales once well told
     Can soon seem old
     With thoughts once cute
     That now are moot.
     But hark! Not all
     Old books will fall!
     There are a few
     That charm anew:
     When they’re redone
     They’re loads of fun.

     And so we come, prosaically enough, to eight of the marvelous Nancy Shaw/Margot Apple “Sheep” stories packed into a brand-new oversize board book and designated part of the 5-Minute Stories series. The original, somewhat longer versions of the tales have been around for a while: Sheep in a Jeep dates to 1986, Sheep on a Ship to 1989, Sheep in a Shop to 1991, Sheep Out to Eat to 1992, Sheep Take a Hike to 1993, Sheep Trick or Treat to 1997, Sheep Blast Off! to 2008, and Sheep Go to Sleep to as recently as 2015. But the age of the originals matters not at all, because Shaw and Apple have created a series of genuine early-childhood classics whose fun-to-follow rhyme schemes and always-amusing adventures are as captivating now as when they were first published. The stories in the new collection are not given in chronological order, but that scarcely matters. The initial misadventure that ends with “Jeep in a heap. Sheep weep” is as timeless as the Halloween tale in which the treats offered to the sheep are not all equally appetizing: “Spiders give a dried-up fly. Sheep decide to pass it by.” The especially clever solution to a need for birthday-gift money in the shop is as smart as ever: “Sheep clip wool, three bags full.” The words in the outdoor hiking adventure are as much fun to read as always, and the accompanying pictures fit them beautifully: “Yuck! Muck! Soggy backs! Blub! Blub! Sloppy packs!” The spaceship adventure blasts off enjoyably anytime, with the sort-of-sheeplike aliens (green wool, six limbs, two extra eyes on stalks that protrude from the top of their heads) a real joy. The wordplay is always wonderful when the sheep go out to eat: “Sheep get soup. Sheep scoop. Sheep slurp. Sheep burp.” The misadventures of the pirate sheep get just the right words, too, with suitably fishy illustrations: “Waves wash across the ship. Waves slosh. Sheep slip.” No wonder the very last story is, has to be, the one about going to sleep, or trying to: “Nighttime noises scare the sheep. Really, who could go to sleep?” Well, one answer to that question is that young children to whom these stories are read – in, yes, five minutes or so apiece – will sleep soundly and happily if they do not decide to leap up and dash happily about because of all the sheeplike (sheepish?) excitement. In truth, the eight stories here are good for a lot more than 40 minutes of reading time, because they can and will charm again and again. Shaw and Apple have spent more than three decades creating rhymes and pictures that go beautifully and always amusingly together, and that show no sign of seeming old-fashioned, much less outright old, anytime in the foreseeable future.

     A single-story, more-standard-size board book with Karen Beaumont’s picture-perfect text and David Catrow’s text-perfect pictures is also a longtime favorite, originally dating to 2005. The absolutely marvelous juxtaposition of black-and-white art with pictures in multiple hues – sometimes in different parts of the same picture – is a big part of the ongoing delightfulness of I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More! The little boy seen practically bathing in paint on the book’s cover never falls short of hyper-enthusiasm despite his mother’s loudly expressed disapproval of him “paintin’ pictures on the floor/ and the ceiling/ and the walls/ and the curtains/ and the door.” Perfectly sour-faced and downcast-looking when ensconced in a gigantic bathtub in which he is clean but the tub and everything around it are absolutely covered in multiple paint hues, the boy initially accepts his mom’s demand and agrees, in the rhythm of the old “it ain’t gonna rain no more” rhyme: “I ain’t gonna paint no more, no more,/ I ain’t gonna paint no more.” But when he makes that promise, the boy is sitting at the top of a staircase, wearing pajamas, watching his mother put all the paints way up on a high closet shelf – which, on the very next page, he finds he can reach by simply putting a hat box on a trunk on a chair on a cardboard box atop which a bowling ball is resting because, well, why not? All right, maybe the re-acquisition of the paints isn’t exactly simple, but then, neither are the boy’s plans for them (his shock of red hair is a particularly neat artistic touch). Now he agrees that “I ain’t gonna paint no more” just as soon as he does a little more painting, using colors that rhyme with body parts (red for his head) or rhymes that encourage him to continue being artistic (“Aw, what the heck!/ Gonna paint my neck!”). Chest (a super-swirly purple snake), arm (a line of charmingly rendered black ants walking toward the shoulder), hand (a mostly green face with a big smile, with the ants starting their journey by coming out of the smiling mouth) – see, there is only a bit more painting to be done here and there. And there and here and over there and out there and up there and down there and eventually, “I’m such a nut, gonna paint my – WHAT?!” Yes, that last word is courtesy of the boy’s mother, who is illustrated entirely in black-and-white and is entirely fed up and entirely ready to dunk the boy right back in that huge bathtub, where he (and the family dog, which has been, largely inadvertently, part of the whole adventure) are finally seen looking more-or-less clean, while the tub and the bathroom in which it sits are so remarkably messy that Catrow must have been laughing while putting every last finishing bit of combined, congealed and contrasted colors all over the place. Beaumont’s words set exactly the right tone for Catrow’s renditions of the little boy’s joyous, mischievous, devil-may-care expressions – and while adults might justifiably worry that the book is so much fun that it may encourage real-world misbehavior, the whole story is so over-the-top that it is very hard to imagine any child, no matter how enthusiastic, deciding to make an instruction manual out of I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More! Of course, “very hard” is not the same as “impossible.” Parents, you have been warned!

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