Hush hush, keep it down now Richard Scarry
"Richard Scarry's Best First Book Ever", along with The Necronomicon and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a favorite of ACI's and is her preferred afternoon reading.It provides a snapshot of the Cat family and their life in Busytown.
That Cat family has an extended member, Lowly Worm, who apears to have been dumped on them by his absentee parents. Lowly sleeps over and accompanies the family on all its errands. He has chores and seems to have insinuated himself pretty well into the family's life. In addition, it appears that Lowly has a crush on young Sally Cat, giving her a Valentine's Day card.
I don't trust him. He wears a hat with a feather in it, like a pimp.
But all Busytown is dysfunctional. That a pig is the town butcher, presiding over choice cuts of his relatives, is not nearly as weird as the fact that billboards and even postage stamps carry images of the Cat family and Lowly. In such a self-referential and narcissistic place, is it any wonder that its citizens literally sell and eat themselves?
Throughout the book runs Mr. Frumble, always chasing his hat. He, too, is a Pig. In the pursuit of his hat, Mr. Frumble shows up at the Cats' kitchen window, at the schoolhouse, and everywhere they go. He is like Bob Ewell but there is no Boo Radley to counter him. Mr. Frumble will eventually use his hat to mask a quintuple homicide.
The twin Goofuses to the Cat family's (and Lowly's) Gallant are Bop and Bonk Pig, scions of the Pig agro-fortune. Bop and Bonk fight, steal, interrupt their mother, and cause a mess.
As Lowly leaves his lunch with them, he turns and says, "Good luck with your manners lessons!"
One should never attack someone's parenting skills unless one is a TV personality.
TAARG said: "Lowly sure knows how to stick the knife in."
Maybe that's why his parents abandoned him.
posted
by Marty Barrett at Tuesday, September 26, 2006
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home