Circus Carnivore Book

When Kate doesn’t get her way she likes to pout, kick, scream, and shout. She loves to be roodle (she’s no goodle-two-shoodles). And she’s got lots of help there, because inside her head is the Noise-amatron, the nonsense machine that makes all of her wailing and other naughty noises. And there are lots of Noise-a-matron workers— Noolman, Tubswort & Co.—who make sure her misbehavior machine is always going full blast.

But suddenly, Kate’s parents order her to BE QUIET!
Now what?

Come on inside for a jabberwocky journey from noise-some to joysome in this phantasmagoric circus of a book.

Children's Literature

Both the text and the illustrations of this title almost defy description. The rhymes call upon "You out there" to share a secret, but not to tell "them Dullundrears," parents who call the narrator "cranky and pernickety" for the "noxious words coming out of my head." In that head are incredible creatures like "Noolman" who "works the liffenbools, /For screeching out my groigles." Other equally inventive characters live in her head, but are closed down by the Dullundrears "'cause I'm having fun being noodle." The creatures, in turn, decide to design an incredible circus which bursts forth onto the pages that can hardly contain the marvelous, incredible multiple acts of our narrator's rebellious imagination. The complexity of the compelling multidimensional images of both characters and machines covering the totally collaged double pages almost overshadows the knowledge that oil paints and ink were used as part of their production. Pictures of people, of machine parts, of a dozen white hens, framed in cut-outs, share the space with the text in flying banners or labels in multiple type faces. Redlich's visual inventions begin as mechanical drawings on the endpapers and keep blossoming from there in numbers that approach infinity. Each rereading brings new possibilities.