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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