Customer Reviews

Call Me Bandicoot.

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This unusual tale, one of Du Bois' Seven Deadly Sins series, deals with stinginess. Bandicoot is a boy from a wealthy robber-baron style family who has abandoned his home and earns his keep by riding back and forth on the Staten Island ferry, buttonholing passengers and telling them tall tales in exchange for hotdogs, sodas, etc. The narrator, a buttonholed passenger, finds Bandicoot extremely irritating, but can't resist hearing the continuation of his stories so keeps supplying him with food. I can't quite analyze why it is that the reader feels so uplifted at the end of the book - possibly from a lifetime of having made the same choices as Bandicoot himself.
The illustrations are equally wonderful!

Mr. Du Bois' books were a staple of my childhood trips to the library. It is to be regretted that with the exception of The 21 Balloons his books have gone out of print. Recently I began acquiring copies of these familiar works and was pleasantly surprised to find them to be uniformly well written and with a much broader vocabulary than is found in the more recent offerings my children bring home from school.

Call Me Bandicoot is a very typical Du Bois work in its take on the absurdities of modern life. Prophetic in its untimely anti-smoking message and excellently illustrated, it is the story of a storyteller. As with all Du Bois offerings, the moral is not too far from the surface. At the same time the author offers some remarkably mature observations. Indeed, I see a wry self-reference to Mr. Du Bois in the last illustration. The entire book is his self-deprecating take on "that oldest of noble professions, storytelling."

Du Bois taught me to love reading. I can't offer a higher recommendation than that.