Mean Soup Book

Oh my goodness. This book. I just don't know what to say.

I love the lesson. Horace has had a bad day and comes home grumpy. His mother notices and helps him to purge those negative feelings in a healthy way and everything ends well. (Oh hush about spoilers, it's kids book, it wasn't going to end with him running away from home or killing a puppy.)

The only quarrel I have with the story is that one of the 'bad' things that happens is that he gets a love note from a girl. I'm sure some little boys will understand why that is so horrible but mine did not. DD7 and DS5 both asked me why that upset him. It was hard for me to explain because I don't want to be the one to introduce the idea to them that the opposite sex has cooties, or whatever they have these days. Maybe it'll come, maybe it won't, but at this point they didn't understand why Horace wouldn't like to get a love note.

The book is a little surreal. I don't know if it is in the literary and artistic definition of the term, but that word fits how I feel about it. One example, there is a show-and-tell cow. Dude. If you know what that is you need to comment and explain it to me, because we had nothing like that in my school growing up.

The art. Boy, I gotta admit I hated the art. It made me want to cry so that tears would fill my eyes and blur the images because I just couldn't force myself to look away. It defies explanation but I'll try. Each page has a gaudy border that reminds me of those crappy borders that everyone but me was putting on photos they uploaded to Facebook a couple of years ago. You know, the ones that are so bright that you don't notice the photo itself. The mom looks like her body was made from clothes stuffed with other clothes, like a scarecrow. Everything is so bright and in your face that I felt like a bird in a cloud of butterflies, not knowing where to look next. So horrible. But I can't stop looking at the images. My first thought was that they were repulsive. My second thought was that they were probably worthwhile because they look like nothing, and I mean NOTHING, that my kids will see anywhere outside of a modern art museum. I believe it is worthwhile to look at different styles of art, even if they make my eyes bleed.

I love the message of the book. I love the absurdity of the text. I hate the bizarre images. The message, text and images fit together perfectly. I have no idea how that works. We checked this out from the library, but if we owned it I think it might be the one kid's book I'd keep just because I can't stop looking at it. I wish I could understand why I can't stop looking at it.