Review by New York Times Review
ANYONE who knows children knows they are not timid when it comes to pondering ethical conundrums. Rather, as their routine cry of "No fair!" proves, they live for it. "Brief Thief," by Michaël Escoffier, could serve as the basis for a nursery school moot court. Here are the facts of the case: Leon, a green lizard (some species of chameleon, it appears, though this is unstated), has to "go poo." Unfortunately, he is out of toilet paper. Looking for an alternative - "Leaves? No, they're too prickly. Grass? No, that will be too messy" - Leon spots an old pair of underpants hanging on a tree branch. He pauses momentarily to consider this question of fair use. The briefs, with a red and pink pattern, "might belong to someone," he concedes, but then wonders why someone would leave them in a tree. "And anyway," he concludes, "they're full of holes." In short order, Leon uses the underpants to clean himself, then tosses them into the bushes. This is where things get interesting. I would argue that under the laws of the forest or the jungle or wherever it is Leon lives, he is well within his rights to assume the underwear has been abandoned. Leon, however, is made of squishier stuff. Someone starts speaking to him - his conscience or, as it introduces itself, "the little voice you hear inside your head whenever you get up to something naughty." Leon insists he has a clean bill of moral health but eventually confesses the underwear business. His conscience pounces: "Aha! Now we're getting somewhere! Since when are we allowed to touch other people's things? What do they teach you in school, anyway?" If I were Leon I'd answer, "They teach sharing." But "Brief Thief" has been translated from French (it was published under the more ambiguous and very French-seeming title "Ni Vu Ni Connu" - "Neither Seen Nor Known"), and perhaps France's preschool curriculum is more Randian than our own. At any rate, Leon's conscience orders him to wash the briefs, leave them to dry and "GET LOST!" Leon does this, but Escoffier's story, like a good legal thriller, offers a final twist: Leon's conscience isn't what it appears to be, and in a mostly wordless coda, the book reveals who actually owns the underpants and exactly why they are ridden with holes. The answer made both me and a 5 ½-year-old I borrowed to read the book with (it was her half-birthday) laugh out loud. Truly funny sight gags are a picture-book holy grail, or should be, and Kris Di Giacomo's cartoonish yet painterly illustrations are witty in a way children and adults alike will savor. (Parents who frown on bottom-related humor should be aware that "Brief Thief" could well serve as a gateway drug to "Captain Underpants.") Three other new books delve into equally thorny questions of right and wrong, though with perhaps less Dostoyevskian gusto. "That Is Not a Good Idea!," by the great and prolific Mo Willems - the author and illustrator of the Knuffle Bunny and Pigeon books, among many others - takes the form of a silent movie, complete with title cards. The players: Hungry Fox, Plump Goose and Baby Geese. On-screen, Fox tries to maneuver Goose toward a very large soup pot, while in the audience a flock of hatchlings react to events with a continuing chorus of "That is Not a good idea!" and "That is Really not a good idea!" and so on, which I found Really fun to read aloud. (And I mean loud.) Yet again, there is a nice twist - more Sweeney Todd than D.W. Griffith, but nothing a Grimms-tested child can't handle. I would hope "That Is Not a Good Idea!" might lead to a discussion not just of culinary ethics but also of silent film comedy and, perhaps, for dessert, a Buster Keaton DVD. I was less enamored of "The Highway Rat," by the frequent collaborators Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler ("The Gruffalo," "Room on the Broom"). The titular antihero is an old-school, sword-wielding highway robber, like something out of an all-rodent "Barry Lyndon." Donaldson's rhymes are pleasing to read aloud, but the rat himself turns out to be a rather one-note character and is also, well, a rat. (Please excuse my bias. I was exposed to "Ben" at an early age.) On the other hand, I was glad that for once, a bad guy turns out to be genuinely bad and not merely sad or misunderstood (see: the Grinch and every bully on a Disney Channel). Speaking of misunderstanding, a crucial plot point involving a cave and an echo was too subtly delineated for my borrowed 5 ½-year-old - although the fault may lie with her urban upbringing and an attendant ignorance of cavern acoustics. THE villain of "The Dark" is more abstract: the title character itself is the nightly bane of many children, including this book's young hero, Laszlo. Daniel Handler, writing as Lemony Snicket, does a wonderful job of . . . I was going to write "personifying the dark," but "thingifying" is more like it: "The dark lived in the same house as Laszlo. . . . Sometimes the dark hid in the closet. Sometimes it sat behind the shower curtain. But mostly it spent its time in the basement. All day long the dark would wait in a distant corner. . . . At night, of course, the dark went out and spread itself against the windows and doors of Laszlo's house." The illustrations by Jon Klassen, who just won the 2013 Caldecott Medal for "This Is Not My Hat," are fully up to Handler's lovely-spooky conception, poetic and concrete in equal measure. Their story is set in motion one evening when the bulb in Laszlo's night light goes out; the climax will most likely be the first time young readers are exposed to the old "Uh oh, don't go down the basement steps" horror-movie trope. But as the Gods of Narrative demand, descend Laszlo must. Fortunately, there are no shrieks, no blood, not even a cat leaping gratuitously from a shadow - just a gentle, happy ending as Laszlo and the dark reach a détente. Correction: In the second paragraph, the author should not have made a joke about nursery school moot courts. Any preschool administrator now thinking of instituting a moot court to please parents with visions of Harvard Law School in their eyes should forget anything was ever said. Bruce Handy is a deputy editor at Vanity Fair.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 14, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Inspired by Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman, the dashing but dastardly Highway Rat (sporting a hat and cape that would befit Zorro) travels the roads on his steady stead, plundering anyone and anything that he happens upon. The bounty is pretty paltry clover from a rabbit, nuts from a squirrel, a leaf from some ants but that doesn't deter him. He even steals flies from a spider and his own horse's hay. But then a duck tricks him into entering a cave. After he becomes lost, emerges from the other side horseless and hungry, gives up his life of crime, and lands a job in a cake shop where he can finally indulge in all the treats he only hoped for as a Highway Rat. The wide-eyed, brightly colored cartoon illustrations depict a masked rat that looks more goofy than menacing. With rhyming text that uses the refrain of I am the Rat of the Highway, this is a rascally natural for group read-alouds.--Enos, Randall Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The team behind The Gruffalo and other titles returns with a tale of a rodent highwayman whose "manners were rough and rude," stealing food from those he meets on the road. Things look dark for this animal kingdom until a clever duck-who is also an impressive equestrienne-uses the Highway Rat's gluttony against him. Scheffler's drawings always offer plenty of pleasures: his bold ink lines and glowing colors give these pages a comic intensity, and his characters' round, bright eyes exude a geeky earnestness. But this story feels like a missed opportunity. The Highway Rat always demands sweets and junk food from his hardworking, peasant-class victims ("Give me your pastries and puddings!/ Give me your chocolate and cake!"), only to receive the rather bland stuff that makes up their subsistence diets (clover from a rabbit, leaves from the ants, flies from a spider). Rather than make comedic hay of this incongruity, Donaldson and Scheffler seem chiefly interested in portraying the ho-hum selfishness of their protagonist and meting out a humdrum punishment: "And they say he still works in the cake shop,/ sweeping the cake shop floor." Ages 4-8. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-Inspired by Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman," Donaldson tells the tale of a swashbuckling rat with mask and cape who stops hapless travelers and takes their food at sword point. While he prefers chocolates, puddings, and cakes, he steals clover from a rabbit, nuts from a squirrel, and even hay from his own horse. "The creatures who traveled the highway/grew thinner and thinner and thinner,/While the Highway Rat grew horribly fat/from eating up everyone's dinner." A brave duck in a red kerchief lures the thief to a distant cave, supposedly full of biscuits and buns. While he follows the echoes of his own voice deeper and deeper into the dark, the duck jumps on Rat's horse and takes the stolen food back to her hungry friends. Eventually he emerges on the other side of the hill, becomes a reformed rodent, and finds work sweeping the floor at a cake shop. Scheffler's rich, dark palette creates a brooding atmosphere just right for the Highway Rat's dastardly deeds, and his cartoon-style characters are a wonderful tongue-in-cheek contrast. Humorous details abound, including Gruffalo cookies in the cake shop from this British duo's The Gruffalo (Puffin, 2006). This well-paced, rollicking tale is a guaranteed storytime treat.-Mary Jean Smith, formerly at Southside Elementary School, Lebanon, TN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Citing "The Highwayman" as inspiration, Donaldson abandons Alfred Noyes's thrilling romance for a fable in verse that echoes Noyes's propulsive rhythm but not his tragic drama. Though "The Highway Rat was a baddie," he's a comical one, galloping along a country road and seizing edibles from ants and rabbits and even "his own horse's hay!" Finally, a clever duck lures the Rat into a cave with promises of the sweets he craves and while he's in there, his victims feast on retrieved loot. Meanwhile, the Rat follows his own echo to the other side of the mountain and emerges reformed, sort of -- "thinner and grayer and meeker," though his new menial job, "sweeping the cake shop floor," does yield tasty crumbs. Scheffler's cartoon-style illustrations enhance the tongue-in-cheek rhyme with lively portraits of bug-eyed animals looking askance at the sword-wielding and not-particularly-fearsome Rat while adding numerous bereft or disapproving creatures to the action and an expressive sky to the mood. An entertaining read-aloud with art nicely sized for group sharing. joanna rudge long(c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
With a tale that shares more ground with tales of Robin Hood and the Three Billy Goats Gruff than its inspiration, Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman," Donaldson and Scheffler deliver a lot of laughs. With a rhyming cadence evoking the hoofbeat pattern of Noyes' rhythmic verse, Donaldson introduces an anthropomorphic, thieving rat on horseback who steals food from all he encounters. He wants sweets but still takes clover from a passing rabbit, nuts from a squirrel and even a leaf from a line of ants. He grows fat while they starve, until a duck comes along. The rat threatens to eat her since she carries no food, but taking a cue from the Billy Goats Gruff, she sends him in search of her sister, who supposedly has a hoard of "biscuits and buns aplenty" hidden in a cave. Led there, he calls into the cave, mistaking the echo as the sister's response with a list of goodies. When he goes to find the treats, the crafty duck channels Robin Hood to steal back his saddlebags of food for the other animals, leaving the rat to wander blindly through the dark cave. Throughout, humorous illustrations obscure any sense of danger in the story, instead provoking pleasure. In an ending that matches the entire book's comic tone, the rat secures a job cleaning a bakery, leaving the others free of his thieving ways. A treat. (Picture book. 3-7)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
