<i>The Baby in the Hat</i> (review)
2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bcc.0.0455
ISSN1558-6766
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoReviewed by: The Baby in the Hat Deborah Stevenson Ahlberg, Allan. The Baby in the Hat; illus. by André Amstutz. Candlewick, 2008 32p ISBN 978-0-7636-3958-7 $16.99 R 5–8 yrs In this sweetly comedic period tale, the narrator explains how his best friend, as a young boy, caught in his hat a baby falling from an upstairs window. The baby’s mother “rewarded him with half a crown,” which the young lad used to hop a train to London, where he happened to take a bit of a fall himself, plummeting from the [End Page 108] dock onto a sailing ship. After signing on as a cabin boy, our protagonist headed out to sea, where he encountered many wonders and experienced many adventures; returning home to England years later as a grown and successful Navy man, he fell in love with a beautiful face at the window and married that very baby he once rescued, now grown up herself. The story is light on kid-appealing action, but it’s a pleasantly enlarged tale that’s slightly above average in height rather than being unabashedly tall, and there’s a petite touch of poetry in the compact phrases; its comfortable mix of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century flavors and its elements of the fantastical in pirates and mermaids make the narrator’s repeated claims of absolute truth all the more comically dubious. Amstutz’s gouache illustrations pick up on the sly humor of the text: they’re light-filled yet gently old-fashioned, but their allegiance lies with storybooks rather than reality, from the parents’ unruffled response to their offspring’s near-fatal plummet to the conclusion wherein the happy reunited pair’s own baby goes a-flying into a young scrubber’s topper to start the whole thing again. In addition, the scenes are enjoyably detailed and scattered with amusing speech balloons (often for the purposes of allowing the narrator’s younger self to enter the scene and insist on the truth), so they repay examination beyond the cursory. The blend of lighthearted adventure, teasing truth claims, and happy ever after makes this an offbeat little entry likely to please fans of folktales who are ready to branch out a little. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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