Brave Potatoes ..Super Spuds Indeed!
Written: Jan 17 '06 (Updated Jan 17 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Imaginative and Fun. Hordes of Iconoclastic Potatoes
Cons: Absolutely None. It's potatorific. Read this book.
The Bottom Line: Brave Potatoes is one of the greatest spud stories of all time. It's a carnival ride of the first order.
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| nagels's Full Review: Brave Potatoes |
The glossy cover did it for me. One glance and I was spellbound, delirious with tuber rapture. The title itself, “Brave Potatoes”, is enough to quicken a spudophile’s pulse, let alone the cover’s image of over a dozen spuds, their faces beaming with delight, their skins glowing under an eerie orange, neon glow, their skinny little arms raised in triumph and delight, as they recklessly ride Zip, the grandest Ferris wheel on the midway.
Spudopsis
“Late at night at the County Fair
when the crowd’s gone home and the cows have gone to bed
all the prize potatoes rub their eyes
They look to the left. They look to the right.
Everyone’s asleep in the Bud and Bean Arena.”
Rows of pumpkins, summer squash, eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes snooze peacefully on their wooden beds, their little eyes shut tightly, lying there like vegetables. The spuds, however, their eyes open wide, don’t want to hit the sack just yet. Stealthily they tumble to the “hard-knocky floor”, sneak past the slumbering celery and onions, and are soon out the door rolling down the midway towards their destination, the magical Zip.
Simultaneously, way across town at the Chowder Lounge, Chef Hackemup, is preparing his soup, chopper and dicer in hand, vegetables cowering at his approach. All the ingredients he needs are at his fingertips but the one most critical, potatoes. “No, he hasn’t got potatoes.”
Over at the Fair all of the potatoes, “the mamas and the papas and the wee potato buds” are performing aerial daring do atop the Zip hopping from car to car at the end of the Ferris wheel’s spokes. Meanwhile Hackemup, looking across town through his binoculars, spies the rambunctious spuds and decides to snap ‘em up in some burlap sacks. One by one he rudely tosses them into his sacks as thoughts of adding these final touches to his massive pots of soup dance in his evil head.
Back in Hackemup’s kitchen, the atmosphere fogged by the steam of boiling broth, the chef admonishes the assembled spuds to accept their fates as he brandishes one angry potato over the colossal kettle. “But potatoes never listen. Potatoes have no ears.”
An army of taters climbs the ladder beneath the white-jacketed nemesis, pushing him by the caboose into his own soup. His caboose and the rest of him are cooked. Dozens of spuds in the night race down the road carrying red and yellow streamers back to the midway to resume their interrupted ride on Zip.
Brave Potatoes,(published in 2000) written by Toby Speed and Illustrated appropriately by Barry Root is an absolute joy and a deep ladle of fun. It is the kind of book one loves to read aloud to children, the kind they want to hear again, the kind one remembers for many years thereafter. The text is rich with rhyme, alliteration, rhythm and unexpected, lexicological twists and turns.
The graphic artistry of Barry Root is dramatic, compelling, and exciting with an abundance of shadowy orange and subdued russet. His complex illustrations have an oil painting quality and are a destination in and of themselves, not just a happenstance adjunct to the text. The pictured brave potatoes are not piles of rubber stamped sameness, but individualized and varying in shape, size and expression. The graphics and rhythmic, Dr.Seusian text work in tandem to move this delicious story along.
This book by its very nature does not lend itself to easy analysis and categorizing with one of the reading level formulas available to educators. In my research I noticed many sites tagged it with a reading level of grades 1-2. A few gave it a rating of 3.5 grade level.
Some of the vocabulary is far beyond the phonic reach of most first or second graders though it may be part of their listening vocabulary.
Some of the more challenging words are those like: grater, mincer, lounge, tango, unfurl, parsnip, pallid, parachuting, aviators, aerial display, perilous ballet, and mesmerizing.
Phrases like Maldonado mushrooms, Bastaboola beets, jubo jumbalays, and armadilly chili, may not be immediately comprehended but they roll off the tongue and are the infectious catalysts of smiles and laughter. Brave Potatoes is a roller coaster ride of a book, a joyous scream not to be missed, and one that demands repeating. What a fantastic film this could make!
Other potato themed books
Edgar Potato
Mr. Potato Head’s Big Night Out
Mr. Potato Head Unplugged
ISBN 0399231587
Recommended:
Yes
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