A sciurine Werther
June 18th, 2008 | Tags: fake book reviews, zoltan
Choppy Goes To School, by Wenceslaus Davies-Jones. (Spanner Juvenile, 2008)
Many authors of juvenile literature have made great contributions to mollifying troubled children in various situations: going to bed, going to the doctor, the arrival of a new sibling (cf. Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon, Søren Tyggegummi’s Zoltan Pays For His Parents’ Vaccine Panic, and Eric Carle’s The Very Lonely Toddler, respectively). The best of these sorts of didactic books are cherished by children and parents alike, and one gets the sense that Wenceslaus Davies-Jones envisions Choppy Goes to School as a new representative of this fine tradition. Unfortunately, one also gets the sense that he is almost totally wrong.
This treacly tale more-or-less details the antics of Choppy Chipmunk as he prepares to attend school for the first time. The colors are bright and garish; the overall presentation is crude, unrefined, and amateurish. Indeed, if we were not told that Choppy was intended to be a chipmunk, it would be difficult to determine as much from his likeness. One sincerely hopes that Davies-Jones’ incompetent illustrations are meant to evoke the finger-paintings of untalented children, but this conceit cannot excuse the dismal typography, which appears to employ Comic Sans.
The unattractive construction of this slim volume does little to hide the total lack of any redeeming value in the narrative. Choppy is basically a sciurine Werther (note his day-glo coat and the “Lotte Lemur” character), whining his way through a wholly unremarkable first-day-of-school scenario and demonstrating baleful self-pity grossly disproportionate to his circumstances. Unfortunately for the state of children’s literature, Choppy fares rather better than his young German counterpart, although the saccharine ending, in which a cliched, uncritical feel-good-about-yourself message is cheapened by the protagonist’s reliance on particular name-brand toys, might leave parents wishing that Choppy had instead told Lotte Lemur that he was going on a journey.