A FUNNY THING HAPPENED AFTER SCHOOL...

Excuses accompany another excursion into the explanatory unknown.

Henry, hero of such books as A Funny Thing Happened at the Museum (2017), returns with a trip into deep space. Confronted by their teacher on the whereabouts of their homework, Henry and his friend Ali (short for “Alien”?) launch into an extended excuse about the barriers they confronted when they left school the day before. As in other collaborations from this team, the mundane text is at odds with the visual accompaniment. Henry will say something relatively benign (“We took a detour because Ali’s mom had to get something from work”), while the illustration tells a different story (everyone disembarks from a spaceship on what appears to be the surface of the moon). Often these pairings work well, though on occasion text and image are at odds (as when Henry tells us what he and Ali had for dinner, while the art eschews an ironic interpretation for a flagrant lie). In the end, confirmation of Henry and Ali’s tale is just outside the teacher’s door. This tale is much in the same vein as other books in the series; the author and illustrator see little reason to deviate from their established form. More’s the pity that the words and images do not align as perfectly as they might. Henry, Ali, and their teacher are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Same old, same old.