Book Love. By Debbie Tung. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
Ruby & Rufus Love the Water! By Olivier Dunrea.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $9.99.
Given the amount of complexity in the
world – and in books for adults and children alike – it is a welcome change to
discover occasional authors who present simple material in a simple way,
leading to the simple delights of unalloyed enjoyment. Debbie Tung does that very
neatly in Book Love, a sweet paean to
the delights of reading and the elements of everyday life that are enhanced by
it. There is no great drama here, nothing filled with strenuous exercise or
major activity – just quotidian scenes of a woman (surely modeled on Tung
herself), her husband, and the books with which they share their lives and with
which the woman, in particular, interacts constantly. Book Love is filled with plain-and-simple niceness, a quality in far too short supply in our video-saturated,
fast-moving age. Every page is a mini-story in cartoon form, usually four
pleasantly drawn panels, on some aspect of the everyday life of a book lover.
The expected cartoonish exaggerations are not, in this case, very exaggerated
at all. On one page, for example, the woman thinks about wanting to buy some
new books, “but I’m also running low on food,” and decides to “choose which one
is more important.” The final, wordless panel shows her walking away from a
bookstore carrying a gigantic stack of volumes. That is mildly and pleasantly
amusing (“mild” and “pleasant” are appropriate adjectives for just about
everything in Book Love), and really
not far from the truth for book lovers: they may not buy books to the exclusion
of food, but they may limit food purchases or stretch what they have to eat a
bit so they can purchase a much-wanted volume, if not a whole stack of them. And
while the woman in Book Love buys
from charming local booksellers, real book lovers are more likely to order from
Amazon.com or other online sources nowadays. But all this does is give a gently
nostalgic twist to the charm of the small everyday events that Tung shows so
lovingly. Even when she does use cartoon conventions, she does so with the
clear intent to warm book lovers’ hearts: one page has a book talking to the
woman, saying “read me” and “I know you want to read me” as she tries very hard
to concentrate on something else, talking back to the book and saying she is
busy working and has no time for reading it right now. Of course, the final
panel – another wordless one – shows her reading avidly, her work put aside.
That, minus the talking book, is an absolutely accurate portrayal of book
lovers’ relationship with the necessities of life. Then there is the scene in
which the woman and husband walk past a bookshop and he offhandedly asks her,
“Are there any books you need?” After a moment’s thought (in yet another
wordless panel: Tung uses these expertly), the woman replies, “That is a very
dangerous question.” The gentle humor is only part of what makes Book Love so attractive: Tung also slips
from time to time into outright advocacy, which is most welcome at a time when
screens have supplanted books for so many people. For instance, she offers a
series of panels called “Why Books Are the Best Gifts,” one of which shows a
young girl sitting on her bed, holding a book tightly and smiling gently, above
the caption, “The right book will have stories that stay with the reader
forever.” That is a near-perfect encapsulation of the wonderfulness of books,
and a lovely sentiment for Tung to share with other book lovers everywhere.
The usual complexity of today’s children’s
books lies in the many busy activities in which characters engage, the sheer
number of those characters, and the detail lavished on the drawings by
illustrators determined to catch young readers’ eyes in an age when moving
screen pictures are far more likely than books to be everyday fare. Against
this trend are the “gosling” books of Olivier Dunrea: small-sized charmers
featuring absolutely adorable goslings drawn almost (but not quite)
realistically and shown having minor, thoroughly cute adventures through
illustrations that keep the goslings front-and-center against a pure white
background. The latest delightful entry in this always-delightful series is Ruby & Rufus Love the Water! The two
title characters look identical, except that Dunrea shows Ruby wearing a
red-and-white polka-dot bathing cap while Rufus wears a red-and-white striped
one (no attempt at complete realism
here!). The little illustrative touches in these books are always among their
highlights: Ruby is first seen facing right and dripping water, while Rufus is
introduced facing left and looking at a lovely blue butterfly that has landed
on his beak. Like other two-gosling books by Dunrea, this one shows the mild
ways in which the characters differ: Ruby does swan dives into the pond while
Rufus does back dives, for example, and Ruby stands on her head underwater
while Rufus chases fish. But in most of the book, the friends do things
together, swimming during rain and in wind and generally having a fine time
together on the pond they both love. Then one day it gets cold and snows, and
the pond water freezes, leading Ruby to tap the ice with her bill while Rufus
taps it with his foot. How can the friends play at the pond now? The answer is:
very amusingly indeed. Dunrea’s pictures of Ruby taking giant steps on the ice
while Rufus “slides across the ice on his chin” are just adorable, as is the
view of the two of them scooting across the pond inside a red-and-white,
doughnut-shaped pool float. Eventually what happens is – well, nothing very
much: that is what makes Dunrea’s books so relaxing to read, since essentially
all they offer is scenes of friendship and everyday not-quite-realistic gosling
life. The last page here simply shows the two friends frolicking in the snow
after apparently building a rather lumpy-looking snow gosling, which appears in
the background and is another of the delicious little details that Dunrea
scatters throughout the “gosling” books – definitely including Ruby & Rufus Love the Water!
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