Post by Dante on Aug 28, 2011 12:33:13 GMT -5
"Being the New Kid Isn't Easy"
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Will you be my friend? With the possible exception of “Does this look infected?,” there is no more off-putting question. Friends are like handkerchiefs: everybody needs them, but the sight of someone asking for one is so mortifyingly vulnerable that you want to avert your eyes from the whole mess. As with handkerchiefs, it’s probably best not to look at friendship too closely, at least until you’ve had it around for a while. We stick with our friends for an entanglement of reasons, and three new picture books, while ostensibly feel-good tales about making friends, turn out to be much closer to the complicated and murky truth than one might guess from their cheery covers. Also, two of the books have splendid artwork.
The third, alas, is “Sea Monster’s First Day,” in which the illustrator Andy Rash, dreaming up a sea monster named Ernest, squanders an opportunity by giving us a cartoon we’ve all seen before, a bright green brontosaurus or perhaps a cousin to the Loch Ness monster (his favorite toy is “Little Nessie”). Although the title sounds natal or cosmological, the book is actually about the first day of school, and Ernest swims around the watery campus of Lake Ernestamke, mapped out in the frontispiece, trying to make friends. A game of Marco Polo doesn’t work out. He dwarfs the swing set. Some of the schools of fish (get it?) are standoffish. Only when Ernest catches a glimpse of a lakeside roller coaster does Kate Messner’s hero discover the key to popularity: letting the other aquatic creatures ride up and down his curvy form. While some may take umbrage at the implied lesson — imagine telling a teenage girl that the best way to make friends is to offer her body as a carnival ride — a roller coaster is an apt symbol for the rough and tumble of social life. One moment nobody likes you; the next you’re a big fish. I wish “Sea Monster’s First Day” were more fun to look at, but that’s life at the bottom of a lake.
Happily, David Mackintosh’s books are always something to look at, so it’s no surprise that “Marshall Armstrong Is New to Our School” takes on friendship from a different angle: the book is narrated by an established insider, forced to be nice to the new guy. Young Armstrong is fascinating, and Mackintosh gives us a two-page spread of his oddities, ranging from the physiological (“His freckles look like birdseed on his nose”) to the sartorial (“His laces are straight, not crisscrossed like mine”) to the misunderstood (“His glasses belong to another boy” — i.e., Ray Ban). The narrator’s not eager to attend the birthday party of this precocious, allergic, fountain-pen wielding stranger, but Marshall Armstrong’s house turns out to be a similar parade of wonders, from the thrilling (“We all ride down the special fireman’s pole, from the top of the house to the bottom”) to the intriguing (“We take turns looking at the sky through a telescope, and through a microscope at the cut on Jane’s arm.”) to the borderline snarky (“Bernadette has to go home early”). The illustrations are a rush of sketch and shape and texture, not unlike the work of Oliver Jeffers, although my favorite bit is a calm drawing of a game of hide-and-seek, with not a single child visible. This party of a book gives us an unsettling truth: one reason Marshall becomes appealing is that he has lots of great stuff. How I wish that didn’t ring true.
Peter Brown’s new book comes on very strong, which is appropriate because his heroine, a bear named Lucy who previously explored the boundaries of love and captivity in “Children Make Terrible Pets,” is a lot to handle. Look at her on the cover, with a manic grin, shouting the title in a pink speech bubble: “You Will Be My Friend!” (One is tempted to read it in a German accent.) Lucy wakes up excited to make a new friend and bounces around the forest in her attempts to win others over; she leaps into a frog pond, scrubs a skunk of its unfriendly smell and squeezes her girth into a rabbit warren. Her efforts begin to wear her out, and finally we see her, in my favorite spread, collapsed by a tree stump, numbly saying “This is hopeless.” That’s when the flamingo arrives, and Lucy finally makes a friend in the forest by befriending a creature who, um, doesn’t live in the forest. The implied moral is “be yourself,” but it’s not clear why Lucy’s friendship with the flamingo works out better than her attempts with the others — something, past all reason, just clicks.
I click with this book. Brown has pushed his style past its smoother beginnings, in books like “Chowder” and “Flight of the Dodo,” into a homemade hybrid of pencil and construction paper and even wood. Who knows how he does it, really? The appeal of “You Will Be My Friend!” is as deep a mystery as friendship, but I’m not interested in delving into its mysteries. I just want to take it to lunch.
Daniel Handler writes children’s books under the name Lemony Snicket.
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Will you be my friend? With the possible exception of “Does this look infected?,” there is no more off-putting question. Friends are like handkerchiefs: everybody needs them, but the sight of someone asking for one is so mortifyingly vulnerable that you want to avert your eyes from the whole mess. As with handkerchiefs, it’s probably best not to look at friendship too closely, at least until you’ve had it around for a while. We stick with our friends for an entanglement of reasons, and three new picture books, while ostensibly feel-good tales about making friends, turn out to be much closer to the complicated and murky truth than one might guess from their cheery covers. Also, two of the books have splendid artwork.
The third, alas, is “Sea Monster’s First Day,” in which the illustrator Andy Rash, dreaming up a sea monster named Ernest, squanders an opportunity by giving us a cartoon we’ve all seen before, a bright green brontosaurus or perhaps a cousin to the Loch Ness monster (his favorite toy is “Little Nessie”). Although the title sounds natal or cosmological, the book is actually about the first day of school, and Ernest swims around the watery campus of Lake Ernestamke, mapped out in the frontispiece, trying to make friends. A game of Marco Polo doesn’t work out. He dwarfs the swing set. Some of the schools of fish (get it?) are standoffish. Only when Ernest catches a glimpse of a lakeside roller coaster does Kate Messner’s hero discover the key to popularity: letting the other aquatic creatures ride up and down his curvy form. While some may take umbrage at the implied lesson — imagine telling a teenage girl that the best way to make friends is to offer her body as a carnival ride — a roller coaster is an apt symbol for the rough and tumble of social life. One moment nobody likes you; the next you’re a big fish. I wish “Sea Monster’s First Day” were more fun to look at, but that’s life at the bottom of a lake.
Happily, David Mackintosh’s books are always something to look at, so it’s no surprise that “Marshall Armstrong Is New to Our School” takes on friendship from a different angle: the book is narrated by an established insider, forced to be nice to the new guy. Young Armstrong is fascinating, and Mackintosh gives us a two-page spread of his oddities, ranging from the physiological (“His freckles look like birdseed on his nose”) to the sartorial (“His laces are straight, not crisscrossed like mine”) to the misunderstood (“His glasses belong to another boy” — i.e., Ray Ban). The narrator’s not eager to attend the birthday party of this precocious, allergic, fountain-pen wielding stranger, but Marshall Armstrong’s house turns out to be a similar parade of wonders, from the thrilling (“We all ride down the special fireman’s pole, from the top of the house to the bottom”) to the intriguing (“We take turns looking at the sky through a telescope, and through a microscope at the cut on Jane’s arm.”) to the borderline snarky (“Bernadette has to go home early”). The illustrations are a rush of sketch and shape and texture, not unlike the work of Oliver Jeffers, although my favorite bit is a calm drawing of a game of hide-and-seek, with not a single child visible. This party of a book gives us an unsettling truth: one reason Marshall becomes appealing is that he has lots of great stuff. How I wish that didn’t ring true.
Peter Brown’s new book comes on very strong, which is appropriate because his heroine, a bear named Lucy who previously explored the boundaries of love and captivity in “Children Make Terrible Pets,” is a lot to handle. Look at her on the cover, with a manic grin, shouting the title in a pink speech bubble: “You Will Be My Friend!” (One is tempted to read it in a German accent.) Lucy wakes up excited to make a new friend and bounces around the forest in her attempts to win others over; she leaps into a frog pond, scrubs a skunk of its unfriendly smell and squeezes her girth into a rabbit warren. Her efforts begin to wear her out, and finally we see her, in my favorite spread, collapsed by a tree stump, numbly saying “This is hopeless.” That’s when the flamingo arrives, and Lucy finally makes a friend in the forest by befriending a creature who, um, doesn’t live in the forest. The implied moral is “be yourself,” but it’s not clear why Lucy’s friendship with the flamingo works out better than her attempts with the others — something, past all reason, just clicks.
I click with this book. Brown has pushed his style past its smoother beginnings, in books like “Chowder” and “Flight of the Dodo,” into a homemade hybrid of pencil and construction paper and even wood. Who knows how he does it, really? The appeal of “You Will Be My Friend!” is as deep a mystery as friendship, but I’m not interested in delving into its mysteries. I just want to take it to lunch.
Daniel Handler writes children’s books under the name Lemony Snicket.
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