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Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Enemy Pie review

Enemy Pie
by Derek Munson, illustrated by Tara Calahan
2000


A clever
dad bamboozles his son into spending the day with the bothersome kid next door, Jeremy Ross, the "one and only person on my enemy list." The pie, dad explains, will rid oneself of enemies, but only if you spend a day being nice to them first. In many ways the book is a wordier, more colorful update of Let’s Be Enemies by Janice May Udry (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) and the story contains the same kind of charm, with a child’s perspective on the difficulty of maintaining friends. The book is illustrated in color pencil and pastels. The characters possess bobble-heads with very wide set eyes. The skewed perspective in the book (crooked, jangled walls, close ups of random objects such as a baseball, during the baseball game where the children are shown far in the distance) is suspended for one scene… that of the two boys, meeting on Jeremy’s doorstep, midway through the book when the boy asks Jeremy if he can come out to play, underscoring that this is a serious moment indeed. This picture book would make a great Father’s Day book, because of the warm relationship depicted between a dad and his son.


I borrowed this book from the library.

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