New Arrival: Picture Book: The Adventures of Beekle the Unimaginary Friend, Dan Santat

The Adventures of Beekle, The Unimaginary Friend
Dan Santat
ISBN: 9780316199988
Lovely imaginative mixed-media panels, but a strange and meandering storyline.

I'm sadly really unappy about this one.  Spoilers ahoy, so I can ramble.

PLOT: An adipose-looking (ref. Doctor Who) blob person lives on the island of imaginary friends, where they hang about waiting for kids to imagine them, whereupon they are teleported off the island into the real world with their new best friend.  But no one imagines the blob, so he decides to take matters into his own hands and find his friend.  He travels to the real world (done in grey and taupe) where he's stunned by the boring and sad nature of all the grownups, until he finds a park with children, happily accompanied by their imaginary friends (the park is a lovely, but confusing, illustration - it's difficult to tell which constructs are imaginary friends and which are park play equipment) but still no friend.  He climbs a tree to see further, but still no dice, until a little girl comes by, and they sort of awkwardly ease into friendship, she names him Beekle, and they play happily together forever, the end.

Hokay.

First issue - a jungly "exotic" island of creatures who have their own lives and presumably interests and dreams, but live there just waiting for someone they don't know to essentially capture them and spirit them away to a different "civilized" world where they get assigned a name, and are stuck there as best friends forever with no escape is a little Curious George gets kidnapped by the Man in the Big Yellow Hat, yes?  Colonialism is not a cool concept to reference, and while kids are innocent and won't get it, lots of parents (especially parents of color) WILL, and that isn't a great way to start off.  It just - between the "rapture beam" illustration of the imaginary friend who was chosen, and the idea that they don't even have names until a kid names them, but they do have lives and imaginations and willpower and enough determination to take a difficult journey - but no name?  Just... really offputting.

Second issue - I am the first person to sing the praises of picture books with no drama.  Nothing happens, no conflict, everything is peaceful or fun, life is good - I love those books.  But, they have to have a structure that supports the lack of drama or conflict.  This book isn't like that.  It's a journey - an ADVENTURE!  It's in the bloody title already!  But our little blob friend just meanders through everywhere, looking vaguely nonplussed, but not afraid or menaced, or really even very sad, even though the text assures us he is.  If you're going to have an adventure, perhaps it should be adventurous?  I just can't see this holding the attention of a room full of little ones.

Third issue - it's pretty obvious that the intended "moral" of the story is that finding and making friends is sometimes a slow process, and can be awkward.  I got that, and it's a great moral, especially for shy or socially-anxious kids.  However, I think that the framework of the imaginary friend isn't so hot for this message, and in fact, I think that it's sending entirely different messages through the choices of text and illustrations.  Here's why.

First off, since the imaginary friend is our "hero character" for most of the book, that's who the readers will most likely identify with.  He wants a friend, so he looks for one, and then he does a favor for someone, they stand around awkwardly, sort of toe-into the idea of hanging out, then what do they do?  She NAMES him, and they proceed to do everything that she wants to do, in her world, by her rules.  Now our moral message is "find someone that you like, and make them like you by doing everything they ask" which is a great way to keep that book about co-dependency on the re-print list for decades to come.

Secondly, an imaginary friend by nature only has ONE human person that sees them, knows them, and is friends with them.  So not only is our protagonist blob-person stuck with the herculean task of finding the ONE SINGLE RIGHT person, then once found, that's the only friend there is.  And that isn't how it works with kids, nor is that a healthy concept.  Again, the implied message there is that "there's only one bestfriend/soulmate for you, and once you find them, everything will be perfect forever" which is wrong on so many levels that I really don't know where to start.


So - sadly, because it's awfully cute, and I'm especially vulnerable to adorable little almost adiposes - I have to vote to give this one a miss because it just twigs too many weird uncomfortable issues for me to be able to recommend.  

Picture Book/Modern Fairy Tale: Pumpkin Light, by David Ray

I really wanted to like this, as I love Halloween, and I really enjoy modern created fairy tales (Jane Yolen's Girl in the Golden Bower is a perfect example), but I was not entranced or even interested in this stolid story with little magic or interest, and painfully workmanlike illustrations.

Pumpkin Light
David Ray
ISBN: 0399220283

I wanted to like it - a book about an early Americana farm boy who loves pumpkins and gets cursed?  Sounds great!  Sadly, the author/illustrator bit off more than he could chew, with both the story and the illustrations getting away from him right from the beginning.  This is a quote from the set-up of the story; "Now there was one other thing Angus loved as much as his mother and father and almost as much as pumpkins and that was to draw and paint."

Just, no.  I'm sorry to be blunt, but those are not the lines of a good story, or a good tale to read aloud to someone.  Sadly, it was like that all the way through.


Bare bones story:
Pumpkin-loving artistic kid stays up too late on Halloween, gets sent to bed without supper, has a very complex bad dream, and wakes to find everything better again.

Longer version:
Angus was born in the fall, under a pumpkin sun, and loves pumpkins and art.  He always goes to town on Halloween to draw the jack o'lantern display at the General Store, then goes home and hangs his pictures on his bedroom walls.  One Halloween he stays too late drawing and runs home (past jeering children who are out there being hateful for no reason at all) and returns home after dark to angry parents who send him to sleep with no dinner, and no pumpkin pie, and no time to hang his drawings on the walls.

Suddenly he's in a hayloft in a barn overlooking his house, watching his mother set a pumpkin pie out on the windowsill to cool.  He's hungry, so he sneaks over, steals the pie, and hides under a scarecrow (why god why) to eat it.  The spirit of the scarecrow (because there has to be a scarecrow spirit) is angry at him for stealing the pie when he was sent to bed with  no supper.  So the scarecrow turns him into a dog, and names him Autumn (Why?  Who knows.) and passes on the terms of the curse - "Autumn" has to spend every night in the barn loft, guarding a "magic pumpkin" (wtf?) until "a forgiving soul carves it and releases the power to change you back into a boy."  Ok.

So now Angus' parents are super sad because their little boy is gone, but the little dog keeps them company, except it insists on sleeping in the loft (and no one asks why this dog is so attached to the loft, or ever goes to check).  A whole bloody year later, somehow the parents magically know the dog's name is Autumn (not even going there) and the boy-dog finally gets a clue that perhaps he can trick Mom into carving the magic pumpkin for her (apparently only once-a-year) pumpkin pie.

He nips and drags at her until she gets up there, sees this lovely pumpkin, and (still not asking WHY a pumpkin is in her hayloft) she drags it home and begins to cut it open, but overcome with memories, decides to try to carve it into a jack o'lantern like her missing son would have done.  The pumpkin lights up magically, and yay, Angus is back!   About here is where I notice that dad has gone suspiciously missing through this whole ordeal.

The light from the pumpkin grows brighter and blinds the magically recovered boy, and when he blinks to clear his eyes, he's home in bed, with his parents hanging up his pictures on his walls, and a pumpkin pie smell wafting in from the kitchen (she baked a fresh one for breakfast, apparently).  A lengthy (everything about this book is lengthy) coda explains how Angus always afterwards treasured a special painting of a dog and a pumpkin.


Ok, so this is obviously trying for Film!Oz territory, where it's all a dream, or is it!?  However, it just seemed like it was trying too hard.  A scarecrow spirit cursing a boy for disobedience ought to be right up fairy-tale alley, easy to accept, but it fell flat, and begged for an explanation.  Why a dog?  Why the deal with guarding the pumpkin?  What would happen if he didn't?  It just didn't make any sense, but so much time was spent explaining things that didn't need explaining, it made the magical (and not-explained) personages and events stick out terribly.

I hate when this sort of thing happens, because I want to fix the story, and it isn't mine, and I can't do anything about it.  Perhaps I'll write my own Halloween fairy-tale with a jack o'lantern obsessed child and see if I can do any better.