Customer Reviews

Searching for Oliver K. Woodman

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Most of our eight- and nine-year-olds found this sequel to The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman a disappointment. Although they enjoyed the tale being told (again) through letters, postcards and newspaper articles, they thought this storyline was confusing with too many new characters to follow. They did love the oil-over-acrylic illustrations, and advise the second and third grade audience to pay close attention to the details to better understand the fast-paced plot. For the best travel-tracking, they recommend the reader become familiar with the cities and states mentioned, and refer often to the maps on the book's end pages. As an introduction to the recurring places and people, our young reviewers suggest starting with The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman. In fact, the reappearance of one particular character renewed their interest in this story and had our third graders hoping he'll be featured in another, more clever Woodman travelogue.

When young Tameka Schwartz, loses her friend Oliver K. Woodman, she and her uncle enlist the aid of reporter Paige Hall to find him. The reporter and Tameka's uncle, Raymond Johnson, send a wooden private investigator (Ms. Imogene Poplar, who is actually made of wood) to find the "local traveler of some renown," as Paige Hall calls him in her newspaper piece about the missing Woodman. Hall and Johnson place a letter in Poplar's bag asking that anyone who reads it write back to Hall, so that she can keep up with the investigation. Various people pick up and transport Poplar to various locations, and the style and content of their letters to Paige Hall reflect their various personalities, jobs, and locations, along with reporting either seeing Woodman or hearing of him.

This Griffin and Sabine-like gimmick works for awhile, but the appeal of various strangers spread about the country successively working to find Woodman (think "Six Degrees of Separation") is soon lost in a confusing story that neither establishes a convincing point of view nor conveys much humor or excitement. Paige Hill and Mr. Johnson, for example, laugh together when they write the letter for Poplar, as if they are planning a big joke on Tameka: Sending a wooden figure out on the road just to see (like a message in a helium-filled balloon) what responses they might get. Much of the problem lies in whether we are to take Oliver Woodman and Imogene Poplar as fantasy figures who actually do things and make friends, or as what they appear--carved wooden figures. The people who encounter Poplar seem to write about her as if she were real, projecting their own interests and needs onto her (e.g., the rodeo clown says she'd make a great rodeo clown, the jazz band director--in a phony bop "jazz" voice--writes that Ms. Imogene has a jazz ear), but the reader is left looking at one very wooden figure and wondering whether Tomeka really misses the missing Oliver K. Woodman. The relationship between Tameka and Woodman is just one of the missing elements here, and we never know what, if anything, Tameka is thinking while he's gone. There's an irrelevant and predictable subplot about Mr. Johnson and Paige Hall becoming a couple and marrying: These are the same two uninteresting people shown laughing and smiling as they set Poplar out on her quest for Tameka's lost "friend." The nicely done pictures are designed primarily for younger children, but the profusion of characters and narrative twists makes this generally inappropriate for them. A confused and confusing story, "Searching for..." can't even muster much excitement when the two wooden figures finally meet.