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As any kindergarten teacher will tell you, young children frequently get their Bs and Ds mixed up. Margaret Atwood's hilariously alliterative picture book about "Bashful Bob" and his friend "Doleful Dorinda" is unlikely to remedy any of this consonant confusion, but it certainly offers a delightful ballyhoo of B and D sounds. Like its predecessors,
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut and the less accomplished
Rude Ramsey and the Roaring Radishes, this children's book consists almost entirely of words beginning with the same letter (or, in this case, two letters). Bob, we're told, was "abandoned in a basket, beside a beauty parlour" by his "bubbleheaded mum" who was "so blinded by her burnished brilliance that baby Bob was blotted from her brain." Dorinda, on the other hand, "dumped on distant relatives" after her parents' disappearance, drudges "from dawn to dusk, dabbing with a dust mop and dealing with dirty dishes in a disreputable dive." After the two lonely tots become acquainted and embark on the comic rescue of a buffalo (mistaken by "bureaucratic blunder" for a begonia), their Bs and Ds also begin to fraternize: "'No time for bashfulness,' said Dorinda. 'Duty beckons!'"
There's no denying that the story is driven by its witty wordplay. But this gothic-hued modern fairy tale by the author of Oryx and Crake is actually just as charming as it is clever. Dusan Petricic, who was responsible for Rude Ramsey's scrawling satiric art, adopts a gentler style here, rendering Bob's world in murky yellows and Dorinda's in sorrowful purples. These two worlds blend artfully together in the final picture of the book, which shows Bob and Dorinda (with their recovered parents) dwelling in a mustard-yellow bungalow with mauve trim. --Lisa Alward
From School Library Journal
Grade 1-3–As in the author's
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (Workman, 1995) and
Rude Ramsey and the Roaring Radishes (Bloomsbury, 2004), sophisticated wordplay drives this story. Bob was abandoned beside a beauty parlor as a baby. Raised by three dogs, he barked when bothered and would bound behind bushes or burrow under benches. A block away, Dorinda has problems of her own. Dumped on distant relatives when her parents disappeared, she has lived a Cinderella-like existence, dealing with dirty dishes in a disreputable dive. When Dorinda meets up with Bob, she teaches him how to talk, and together they thwart the advances of a bewildered buffalo wrongly labeled a begonia by a bungling bureaucrat. The simultaneous exploits of the characters are shown in Petricic's line drawings. Color is used to great effect–Bob's scenes have a muddy gold wash and Dorinda's are rendered in purple. The witty, albeit ridiculous plot plays not only with language, but also with fairy-tale conventions. However, despite the happy ending, the relentless alliteration becomes tiresome.
–Linda Ludke, London Public Library, Ontario, Canada Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
