From Amazon.co.uk
Young Capable is a very tired little girl from Frip, a tiny village near the sea whose children are constantly exhausted because of the gappers--gappers being bright orange, very stupid animals with a strange weakness for goats.
When a gapper gets near a goat it gives off a continual high-pitched happy shriek of pleasure that makes it impossible for the goat to sleep, and the goats get skinny and stop giving milk. And in towns that survive by selling goat milk, if there's no goat milk, there's no money, and if there's no money, there's no food or housing or clothes, and so, in gapper-infested towns, since nobody likes the idea of starving naked outdoors, it is necessary at all costs to keep the gappers off the goats.
In Frip, it is the responsibility of the children to rid the goats of the gappers who persistently adhere themselves to the goats. Every three hours, day or night, the children must labouriously, brush them off, put them into sacks and dump them into the sea, from where the gappers begin their journey again. This cycle continues until one day, when a gapper with more brains than any of the others realises that they'd save themselves some effort if, instead of dispersing between all the yards, they just made for the yard closest to the sea--Capable's yard. The little girl finds herself overwhelmed and in need of some help from her neighbours.
This is a wonderfully surreal and imaginative tale perfectly complimented by the incredibly quirky illustrations by Lane Smith. This modern morality tale is told with affection, warmth, wit and a large amount of ironic humour which will make the reading of it as pleasurable to adults as it is to children. --Rachel Ediss
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Saunders's (Pastoralia) idiosyncratic voice makes an almost perfect accompaniment to children's book illustrator Smith's (The Stinky Cheese Man) heightened characterizations and slightly surreal backdrops in this unconventional fairy tale for grownups. Saunders describes the setting, the town of Frip, as "three leaning shacks by the sea," which Smith represents as oblong two-story towers in brick red, ocean blue and mint green situated on irregular plots of land with sinewy trees against a yellow sky that suggest a Daliesque eerieness. The 1,500 gappers, spiky little creatures with multiple eyes, feed on the goats that graze the shacks' backyards; by habit, they split into three groups to attack all three properties at once. One day, the gappers decide that henceforth they will concentrate all their efforts on the goats at only one house, the one closest to the seaAinhabited by a girl, Capable, and her grieving, widowed father. Soon, the two unafflicted families begin to tell themselves that they are superior to Capable and her father ("Not that we're saying we're better than you, necessarily, it's just that, since gappers are bad, and since you and you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us"). Of course it's only a matter of time until everybody's luck changes. The Saunders-Smith collaboration is inspired. Smith adds witty touches throughout, and Saunders's dialogue features uncannily amusing deadpan repetitions and platitudinous self-exculpations. Saunders is much too hip to bring this fable to an edifying ending, but things do conclude as happily as is possible in the morally challenged, circumscribed world of Frip.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
