(+++) ON THE SWEET SIDE

Captain Cake, Book 1: Meet the Candy Crew. By Chris Skinner. Marshall Cavendish Children. $16.99.

      A super-simple adventure for older pre-readers and early readers, the planned Captain Cake series fits squarely into the cute-unchallenging-diverse universe of books for young children, with a couple of distinctions that parents should think about before incorporating the first volume into their libraries. There is nothing all that unusual about the silliness of the idea of food transformed into people, although Chris Skinner throws in a bit of fun by noting that the four crew members are changed from a cake, “a bar of chocolate, a mound of jelly, and, for some reason, a sweet potato.” That takes care of the inevitable question, “What’s a potato doing in this?” The actual transformation is over immediately – a “special ray gun” wielded by General Rock changes everything on a plate into the spacefaring crew of a ship called The Sweet Candy. After that, though, things get a bit, well, sticky.

     The crew members, cleverly drawn by Skinner to incorporate the food items from which they originate (Private Potato, for example, has a sweet-potato-shaped head), have powers commensurate with their origins (thus, Captain Cake can “blast cream and jam from his hands,” although why he would want to do that is up in the air…or up in space). So the “origin” portion of Meet the Candy Crew works well enough. The “adventure” portion is somewhat less successful. The crew’s first mission is to get apple juice, because Commander Pickle needs some. This is a pretty lame mission – it’s a fair bet that even four-year-olds will wonder why the crew, or the commander, can’t just go to the refrigerator or a store for apple juice, instead of trying to find Planet Juice, land on it, and fill their jugs. There is nothing mysterious or exciting about the object of this quest – a fact that diminishes the interest of the book. Parents should think about this, and also about the way Skinner repeatedly interrupts the story to address his young audience directly: “Do you ever get into trouble?” “What would you do if you were him?” (That should be “he,” not “him,” but why quibble?) “Can you be logical?” It is as if Skinner is unsure of the extent to which he wants the educational element front-and-center in the book, compared with the degree to which he wants to keep the very frothy adventure story in the forefront.

     To be sure, this is a “message” book, but the message is so ordinary that even very young kids will likely have heard it before: it is good to have friends, teamwork is good, and it is good to help other people. The stories-within-the-story are a bit of a stretch, too. The most-amusing one is also the one most likely to raise questions: “Lieutenant Chocolate wakes up and finds himself lost in space,” it begins, and he is shown outside in a rocky, moon-like setting, where his wrist communicator fails to connect with other crew members. Because he is the most-logical member of the crew, he tries to think himself out of his predicament, eventually spotting and “following many specks of light” before touching one speck and, it turns out, turning on the lights inside the spaceship: he was never lost in space at all. Or was he? Is this the best a logical kid can do, not knowing the difference between inside and outside? Was the whole thing a dream? Why didn’t the communicator wake anyone up? What were all the little specks of light? How hard is it, really, when he turns the light off again, to remember how to “make his way to his bed in the dark”? Skinner provides no answers – but kids are sure to ask questions. It is funny to imagine the “logical” character unable to tell the difference between outdoors and indoors, but adult readers should be ready to fill in the many plot holes here – or hope that their own kids are not logical enough to spot them.

     Meet the Candy Crew is a very mild book, easy to read and understand. However, it is hard to escape the notion that Skinner’s main desire is not the story, which is thin even by the loosest standards of books for very young children, but to tell young kids how they should behave. Two sentences here pin down the central communication: “Do you know what being brave means? It means helping your friends when they are in trouble.” Certainly that is an unexceptionable point to make; it is also scarcely a new, creative or unusual one. A little more creativity surrounding the very clear messaging would have been welcome. Perhaps that will be delivered through later volumes in the Captain Cake series: Skinner plans to produce five in all.