DANCING LARRY

The Pinkwaters’ Larry is a polar bear of many parts. He plays the bongos, eats blueberry muffins, serves as a hotel swimming pool lifeguard (in Bayonne, N.J.)—and he can cut a step or two. All polar bears can dance, Larry informs his readers, but Madame Swoboda, who teaches a ballet class where Larry has taken the hotel owner’s daughter, tells Larry that polar bears have no place in ballet. Larry proves her wrong. Daniel Pinkwater’s language is a thing of beauty; Larry’s elocution can unfurl like a banner in the breeze (“I have a great desire to tell a story and express feelings through movement”). But it is the deadpan quality of the text that serves as tinder igniting the drollery. The ridiculousness is broadened by Jill Pinkwater’s pen-and-ink artwork: Larry was clearly born to legwarmers, and Madame Swoboda is a smoky vision straight from Central Europe. (Picture book. 4-8)