Stuck

In an exuberantly absurd tale that recalls the old woman who swallowed a fly, a boy named Floyd goes to ridiculous lengths to remove his kite from a tree. Floyd tosses his sneakers, then his cat, into the leafy branches, and when they get stuck, too, he fetches a ladder. "He was going to sort this out once and for all... and up he threw it. I'm sure you can guess what happened." Each spread pictures Floyd pitching another item into the tree and growing increasingly frustrated: a bike, a kitchen sink, the milkman, a fire truck, and "a curious whale, in the wrong place at the wrong time... and they all got stuck." Jeffers (The Incredible Book Eating Boy) pictures the extravagant accumulation in abstract pencil-and-gouache doodles, with hand-lettered text to set a conversational tone. The tall, narrow format reinforces the tree's height in comparison to small, stick-figure Floyd. Jeffers's droll resolution--the kite comes down, although afterward Floyd "could have sworn there was something he was forgetting"--is testament to the boy's single-mindedness and the chaos he leaves in his wake. Ages 3-5. (Nov.)

PreS-Gr 2--Floyd has a problem: his kite is stuck in a tree. Employing kid logic, he throws his favorite shoe to dislodge the wayward object--to no avail. The imaginative hero fetches a host of other items: a friend's bicycle, the kitchen sink, a long-distance lorry, the house across the street, a curious whale ("in the wrong place at the wrong time"). Alas, each item joins its predecessors, lodged in the foliage. Jeffers's deadpan descriptions and the ludicrous scale of Floyd's selections are laugh-out-loud hilarious. As the child carries the house on his head, his neighbor leans out the window, commenting, simply: "Floyd?" Then there is the incongruity between expectation and reality. When he retrieves a ladder, firemen, and finally a saw, readers will surely expect climbing or cutting, but no. Everything gets pitched up, including the light bulb that hovers over the child's head, just before he achieves success. The tree, which continually changes color (and therefore, mood), is a dense, scribbled, layered specimen, perfect for harboring the odd assemblage. The text appears to be hand-lettered, as if written by a youngster. In concert with the quirky, mixed-media caricatures, supported by stick legs, it yields a childlike aesthetic sure to tickle the funny bones of its target audience--and of the adults who share the story with youngsters.--Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library