Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s her Groundling father appears to be a white human. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds. Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read. The dynamic interaction between the characters invites readers to take risks, push boundaries, and have a little unscripted fun of their own The creative naiveté of the “clay mates” is perfectly captured by Petty’s feisty, spot-on dialogue: “This was your idea…and it was a BAD one.” Eldridge’s endearing sculpted images are photographed against the stark white background of an artist’s work table to great effect.
How are they going to “fix selves” on time? Soon a hippopotamus and peacock are staring bug-eyed at a returning pair of astonished hands. But the sound of approaching footsteps panics the pair of Picassos. After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration-expressed as a tangled black scribble-reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices.
A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive.
Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.Ī blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next. In the simple, childlike illustrations, which are made from pieces of cut-and often previously used-paper and scribbled crayons, even the flat figures look 3-D. “What could it be?” puzzles the girl…but opening the final spread reveals the smiling monster radiating scribbly pink hearts, and viewers will have no trouble figuring it out. There’s one feeling that is not accounted for, though. Each emotion is linked to a color: happiness is yellow sadness, “gentle and blue like a rainy day” anger, a violent splash of red calm “is as light as a green leaf / floating in the wind.” One spread-filling pop-up is devoted to each emotion/color, from clouds with lines of string “rain” to a hammock strung between leafy trees all the now-full jars regather toward the end with pull-tabs to reveal their contents. A child helps a mixed-up monster sort out its feelings in this inventive pop-up import from Spain.Ĭompartmentalization is the child’s strategy, as she urges the googly-eyed monster to pour its feelings into individual glass jars.
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