Why is successful Herbert Rowbarge so cold of heart, so lacking in the delight or merriment one would expect of someone so devoted to his popular amusement park and its old-fashioned merry-go-round? The answer, readers are aware throughout, is that "a vital piece of him was wrenched away in his third month of life"—a twin brother adopted from the Home to which both abandoned infants were confined when a day old. After that Herbert's first pleasure in life is a second-hand Noah's Ark, with the animals all in pairs except for "one lonely lion that had lost his twin forever." (It is to the pair of lions on his merry-go-round that the grown-up Herbert goes for comfort.) At three, he finds joy in an entrance-hall mirror, but his tantrums on being carried away result in his being exiled from the hall. Through life, he experiences a pleasurable but terrible "twinkling down the spine" when he catches himself in a mirror. Herbert never returns the affection of his "older brother" from the Home, though the two are business partners through life. He marries for money, is repelled by his wife, and resents through life the twin daughters she bears five years before her death. When they are 40, he arranges for one of the twins to live with and care for a newly widowed aunt; as it doesn't matter which one goes—he can't tell them apart anyway—the two switch off by the month between their aunt's house and their father's. In his later years Herbert has a few near-brushes with his twin, but is never aware of the other man's existence—not even when he kills him in a car accident on the day of his own death at 72. Babbitt alternates chapters in Herbert's life, from birth to death, with dry observations of his devoted 45-year-old daughters Babe and Louisa on those last days before his death liberates them to live together in drab contentment. It's an expertly turned artifact of a story, which is not to deny its human sympathy and penetrating edge.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1982
ISBN: 046004642X
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1982
Broccoli: No way is James going to eat broccoli. “It’s disgusting,” says James. Well then, James, says his father, let’s consider the alternatives: some wormy dirt, perhaps, some stinky socks, some pre-chewed gum? James reconsiders the broccoli, but—milk? “Blech,” says James. Right, says his father, who needs strong bones? You’ll be great at hide-and-seek, though not so great at baseball and kickball and even tickling the dog’s belly. James takes a mouthful. So it goes through lumpy oatmeal, mushroom lasagna and slimy eggs, with James’ father parrying his son’s every picky thrust. And it is fun, because the father’s retorts are so outlandish: the lasagna-making troll in the basement who will be sent back to the rat circus, there to endure the rodent’s vicious bites; the uneaten oatmeal that will grow and grow and probably devour the dog that the boy won’t be able to tickle any longer since his bones are so rubbery. Schneider’s watercolors catch the mood of gentle ribbing, the looks of bewilderment and surrender and the deadpanned malarkey. It all makes James’ father’s last urging—“I was just going to say that you might like them if you tried them”—wholly fresh and unexpected advice. (Early reader. 5-9)
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-14956-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A validating and breathtaking next chapter of a Mother Goose favorite.
Humpty Dumpty, classically portrayed as an egg, recounts what happened after he fell off the wall in Santat’s latest.
An avid ornithophile, Humpty had loved being atop a high wall to be close to the birds, but after his fall and reassembly by the king’s men, high places—even his lofted bed—become intolerable. As he puts it, “There were some parts that couldn’t be healed with bandages and glue.” Although fear bars Humpty from many of his passions, it is the birds he misses the most, and he painstakingly builds (after several papercut-punctuated attempts) a beautiful paper plane to fly among them. But when the plane lands on the very wall Humpty has so doggedly been avoiding, he faces the choice of continuing to follow his fear or to break free of it, which he does, going from cracked egg to powerful flight in a sequence of stunning spreads. Santat applies his considerable talent for intertwining visual and textual, whimsy and gravity to his consideration of trauma and the oft-overlooked importance of self-determined recovery. While this newest addition to Santat’s successes will inevitably (and deservedly) be lauded, younger readers may not notice the de-emphasis of an equally important part of recovery: that it is not compulsory—it is OK not to be OK.
A validating and breathtaking next chapter of a Mother Goose favorite. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-682-6
Page Count: 45
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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