Customer Reviews

Donald and the...

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

 

 

Donald may be small and may be a captive of his inactive, affluent household, but he knows how to take pleasure in the little things. What he finds in the bottom of his upper-crust garbage can fills him with hope and the promise of something he can look forward to each day.

This tiny treasure is for all hominids young and old, single and divorced, sane and insane, smokers and non-smokers, and for all others who refuse to be labeled.

Again, Peter Neumeyer and Edward Gorey prove that plain text and black & white illustrations can be every bit as delightful as the complex and the colorful.

This is an unabashedly weird book for children from 1969, and I doubt it would be back in print were it not for the illustrations by the late great Edward Gorey. I do not consider most of Gorey's work to be meant for children, so this one may be more interesting to his adult fans and collectors. It tells the story (not authored by Gorey but hand-lettered in his inimitable style) of a boy who looks in a trash can and finds a "white worm." He takes it home in a jar, feeds it greens, is absent from it for a few days due to an illness and goes back to find it has turned into... not a butterfly, but a housefly, featuring closeups of its odd wings, legs, mouth, and eyes. And that's the story. All in all it is vaguely unpleasant, though I suppose in some it may evoke a sense of wonder, in others a sense of twisted humor. Offbeat, certainly, but not really a first choice picture book for most children, and not as entertaining (or language rich) for Gorey fans as the many other, more delightfully odd, books that he authored himself.

I am unable to differentiate between gradients of black and white. As such, the pages of this book were just gray sheets. However, I am told that it is a very clever book by my friends who are not mono-chromatically impaired. I have thought about asking someone to color it for me but have been too embarrassed so far.