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Jenkins, Emily That New Animal; illus by Pierre Pratt.
Foster/Farrar, 2005 [32p]
ISBN 0-374-37443-0 $16.00
Reviewed from galleys
4-7 yrs
Publishing is a mysterious thing, especially in its tendency to produce several
books on a similar and apparently random theme in a short period of time. One
recent example is the picture-book plot wherein a household's animals
respond to the arrival of a new baby, seen in Rosen's Howler (BCCB 5/04)
and MacLachlan's Bittle (9/04), and which appears now in its most
witty and yet sympathetic form in Jenkins and Pratt's That New Animal.
The popularity of the concept is understandable, since it's a way of speaking
straightforwardly yet with tactful obliqueness about the dethronement anxiety
of a kid faced with a new sibling, and the pet's-eye view of the world
provides additional charm. These classic appeals receive sparkling, sure-handed
treatment from Jenkins, who is quietly making a career, with books such as Five
Creatures (BCCB 2/01) and Daffodil (7/04), as one of the freshest, most evocative,
and most accessible picture-book writers of family life. Her text here is a deceptively
simple present-tense narrative sculpted down into plainspoken essentials familiar
to anybody who's ever seen their family life altered by a new arrival.
In this case, the main victims of upheaval are Marshmallow, a plump white pooch,
and FudgeFudge, a slightly trimmer brown mutt, and they know the new animal is
trouble right from the start. Despite the fact that it doesn't smell like
a proper dog, it's given FudgeFudge's place on the sofa, and Marshmallow's
pleas for a tummy rub are ignored in favor of its coos. Fairness has gone out
the window: when the dogs make noise, they're disciplined, but everybody
comes running at the new animal's cries. Marshmallow does his best to curb
the resentful FudgeFudge (refusing even to let her "bite it a LITTLE bit"),
but even he finally loses his cool and pees all over the carpet, only to receive
the stern reproof "You're a big dog. . . . What's the matter
with you?" It's another matter, however, when a strange Grandpa arrives
and tries to pick up the new animal; FudgeFudge and Marshmallow fend him off,
declaring, "It's not his new animal to go picking up whenever he
feels like it. It's our animal."
Pratt's paintings are suffused with warm tones and furry-textured brushstrokes
that comfort evenduring the dogs' anxious moments. Not only do baby and
dogs tend to operate on the same visual plane while the adults have their heads
in the clouds, there's a stealthy statement in the characters' drafting--the
big, bulbous baby (with a classic little-old-man facies) is shaped more like
the rotund dogs than his angularly linear parents--that emphasizes the close
connection between baby and pups. The compositions are wisely pared down, ensuring
they don't overpower Jenkins' text, and the canines are comic in
their cheerful blockiness but not visually anthropomorphized: their routing of
a dejected Grandpa with their stiff-tailed barking is authentically doggy even
as it dovetails neatly with the plot.
The book's unerring identification of the sore spots of dethronement--changing
standards, attention drought, physical displacement--will definitely strike
chords of recognition in young audiences, and the naturalness of the canine impulse
for bad behavior in response makes it a superb correlative for sibling resentment.
Even the dogs' eventual acceptance of the new kid is couched in realistically
primal terms that put possession ("It is our new animal to hate as much
as we want to") before affection ("And to like, just a little bit").
Yet there's nothing in the rueful and understanding humor that prevents
this from being a generally funny story about dogs, even as there's everything
in it that allows it to be a reassuring story about family change..
Deborah Stevenson, Editor
Cover illustration by Pierre Pratt from That New Animal ©2005.
Used by permission of Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This page was last updated on March 1, 2005.