The Good Ship Crocodile

January 1, 2014

PreS-K-Borrowing a scheme from Aesop, Lewis and Felix tell a tale of reciprocal rescue, with plenty to enjoy in the viewing. The story opens and closes with a trade-off between a toothy, realistic crocodile and a band of oddly humanoid fireflies. Snout is most amenable when the rainy season floods his river home, impeding the travels of smaller animals. The soggy fireflies, carrying leaf umbrellas in human hands, line up along the crocodile's scaly back and inside his open mouth. "So off they went." Told with economy, the text is handsomely amplified in broad spreads featuring large, close-ups of the animals in the murky terrain. The fireflies are followed by a succession of other creatures whose passage is recorded in a series of wordless pages. These unnamed neighbors-a hedgehog, a pair of frogs, a squirrel, and a family of mandrills-appear in more natural forms, albeit posed in comic stance. The frogs peering down over the crocodile's snout and squirrel's tail arched overhead as an awning convey much about their stormy journeys. "Finally, the sun gulped up all the water. Snout had drifted far down river." The crocodile, now weary and disoriented as night falls, is led back across dry land to his river by those bug-eyed, enormous fireflies. So, as the old fable tells us, one good turn deserves another, and the small can save the mighty, after all. The moral is left fo readers to discern. The spare text would be flat by itself, but the pictures can almost tell the whole tale. The ugliness of the fireflies, seemingly out of character with the other drawings, is perhaps intended for comedy, but the real humor is in the trips made by their fellow creatures.-Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

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