Parts

September 1, 1997
In this humorously askew look at the body, belly-button lint leads a five-year-old boy to believe he's falling apart. "I stared at it, amazed, and wondered,/ What's this all about?/ But then I understood. It was/ My stuffing coming out!" Each discovery increases the narrator's anxiety. Strands of hair in a comb arouse thoughts of premature baldness; "a chunk of something gray and wet," fallen from a nostril, is identified as "a little piece of brain." (Attempting to find answers, the young hypochondriac pores over a stack of books on gray matter, including a "Book of Marbles" for those losing theirs.) The boy's parents insist that nose goo and flaky skin are normal, but their solemn reassurance is met with a gross punch line: "Then tell me, what's this yellow stuff I got out of my ear?" Whimsical cartoons, in warm watercolor hues and texturized with squiggles of colored pencil that resemble the boy's decreasing hairs, show the narrator in the foreground and his worst fantasies in the background. The subject matter, despite its potential to be disgusting, is treated as funny but commonplace. Trying to make sense of one's "parts" is a common childhood concern, and Arnold's (No More Water in the Tub!) comical hyperbole will set children at ease about fears they might hesitate to share. Ages 3-8.

August 1, 1997
Ages 5^-8. The poetry doesn't quite scan, but that's more than balanced by Arnold's unusual topic and his hilarious illustrations. A pop-eyed youngster is having a hard time. He seems to be falling apart. After losing a few hairs, he thinks he's going bald; his belly button lint is his stuffing coming out; "a chunk of something gray and wet" from his nose is none other than a piece of his brain; and a loose tooth puts him into shock. "Quite soon I'll be in pieces in / A pile without a shape. / Thank goodness Dad keeps lots and lots / And lots of masking tape." The gross factor is a key ingredient here, with Arnold exploiting it nicely in bold, comical illustrations that catch the full-blown anxieties of the imaginative narrator. When Mom and Dad intervene, little boy and audience alike breathe a sigh of relief. A zany, ultimately reassuring take on something that may indeed be a child's bugaboo. ((Reviewed Aug. 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)