  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 09/01/2001 Gr 1-4-Through zany, brightly colored illustrations and rhyming verse, Arnold explores common figures of speech that amaze and frighten a young boy. "I'll bet that broke your heart," "give him a hand," "Hold your tongue," and "jumps out of his skin" are only a few of the sayings that worry the protagonist, whose imaginings are energetically depicted in colored-pencil and watercolor washes. Goofy, cartoonlike artwork explores the deepest recesses of the child's overwrought and overworked imagination. Kids will love faces cracking, lungs being coughed up, and bodies flying apart. Vivid color and a robust artistic style will attract younger children who may not get the joke, but older children and parents will. Singsong verses in hand-lettered text strain to rhyme in some instances, with a forced, uneven gait. Although the boy's parents reassure him, the story ends where it begins. The father, who "didn't mean to be unkind," tells the child that they were afraid that he'd lost his mind. The final drawing has the boy's brain falling out of his head and onto the floor. This story is like a wild and crazy, totally manic Amelia Bedelia. Children will ask for it again and again.-Alice Casey Smith, Sayreville Public Schools, Parlin, NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. - Copyright 2001 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Bulletin for the Center... - 09/01/2001 Our young narrator, who in Parts (BCCB 10/97) was convinced that belly-button lint, earwax, and other loose body bits were indication of his corporeal dissolution, here finds new sources of alarm in the words of those around him. His mom suggests that he broke his heart, his dad wants his son to give the old man a hand, his friend’s sister screams her lungs out every night, and all this casual contemplation of physical destruction has him beside himself until his parents explain that these nightmarish notions are merely figures of speech. This verse narrative overstretches in both scansion and concept to make its point, and it’s not as effective as its predecessor in capitalizing on body anxieties. The protagonist is still eminently sympathetic in his frantic confusion and perturbation, however, as most kids have also been baffled a time or two by arcane adult rhetoric; there is also sufficient dwelling on the physical aspects (“My tongue’s a slimy, jiggly, squishy/ Slippery little squirt”) for emotional and readaloud appeal. Arnold’s line-and-watercolor illustrations offer his usual hugely bug-eyed figures clinging to the edge of hysteria, and scenes of plummeting tongues (dropped after being held), spaghetti-noodle arms and legs (from stretching one’s limbs prior to exercise), and the narrator’s desperate attempts to keep it all, literally, together provide the humorous energy the text doesn’t quite muster on its own. Kids dissolved into laughter by the first title may find that this cracks them up. - Copyright 2001 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Loading...
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