![]() Here, Mama Elephant takes Little Elephant for a walk. ![]() I wish I had been as charmed by Eve Bunting’s “Tweak Tweak,” which treads a more familiar path through similar territory. Kids will be reassured as well as stimulated and amused adults will find their own resonances. A cheeky writer, Badescu risks parental dismay by tossing in further anxieties that might never have occurred to kids, like Pomelo’s fear that he “won’t grow equally all over.” The final page finds our hero still trying to make sense of what’s happening to his body, but confident and ready for adventure. “Yippee! Yahoo! Yay! All at once, Pomelo feels the super-hyper-extra force of the cosmos spreading through him.” I wouldn’t want to be the parent who has to explain this metaphysical conceit to a 4-year-old, though Benjamin Chaud’s wonderful illustration of Pomelo vaulting between planets puts the mood across nicely.Ĭhildren, who in my experience are far more nostalgia-prone than adults - I’ve seen kids pine for half an hour ago - will surely relate to this sense of impending loss. Light bulb: Pomelo realizes it’s he himself who’s getting bigger. So too some strawberries, a pebble, a potato and an ant. Badescu’s title character is a little garden elephant (distant relative to a lawn flamingo, I learned from an online garden-supply catalog), who notices one morning that “his favorite dandelion” seems unusually small. I loved “Pomelo Begins to Grow.” Funny, smart and idiosyncratic, graceful and intuitive in a way that feels as much dreamed as written, Ramona Badescu’s tale (translated from the French) is less a story per se than a series of musings, a kind of ad hoc therapy session for those conflicted about getting older, which, in contemporary America, where middle-aged men dress like skate punks and 20-something women covet face-lifts, means pretty much everyone. So elephants: bring ’em on!Īnd here they are, in two new picture books that use elephant protagonists to explore the pleasures and anxieties of growing up, and a third, on the far side of the equation, in which an elephant symbolizes age and endurance - thanks, presumably, to the species’ reputation for long memory and Botox-defying wrinkles. True, they’re not quite so numerous on the bookshelf as bunnies, mice and ducklings, but they outnumber squids by a long shot, and, what with their tree-stump legs, bulky bodies, sail-like ears and those sinuous trunks, elephants are surely more fun for illustrators to draw than just about anything, aside from explosions. This sense of distant kinship, plus the fact that trunks are the coolest appendages this side of opposable thumbs, may be why elephants have been a staple of children’s literature since the days of Rudyard Kipling and Jean de Brunhoff. Few creatures can compete with elephants when it comes to being both magnificent and ungainly, but human children, if we’re being honest with ourselves, come close. ![]()
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