Hickory, Dickory, Dock - Hardcover

Muller, Robin; Duranceau, Suzanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0590736167 ISBN 13: 9780590736169

Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks Trade, 1994

Synopsis

A contemporary twist updates the traditional nursery rhyme in which a group of animal party guests searches for a hidden clock and encounters a series of alarming mishaps.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Children are apt to be bemused by this elegant but jumbled picture book, which opens as a dapper cat in tails and tophat hides a package atop the chandelier while a masked, caped mouse looks on. Next, various animals attend (or crash) a chaotic party where they search for the bundle, identified in the text as a clock. Although the story seems to promise a challenging hunt, perhaps even a bit of mystery, it delivers neither. Some of the "hidden" clock faces heralded in the flap copy may be oddly placed (e.g., on a tabletop) but all are plainly visible; and the whereabouts of the package are revealed at the start. Duranceau's opulent, detailed paintings combine realistic figures with oddly surreal touches, such as a cow jumping out of a painting and a trio of Dali-inspired melting watches. With a luxurious palette that ranges from innocent pink to darkest indigo, these visual adornments make provocative individual tableaux, but are so unrelievedly dense that cumulatively they overwhelm. The text, verses loosely patterned after the nursery rhyme ("Margery, bargery, bow, / The monkey stubbed his toe"), offers little clarification and sometimes generates its own confusion (for example, snippets of dialogue are sometimes unattributed). Ages 5-11.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Despite a pretitle vignette of a landscape draped in droopy clocks, the surreal nonsense here is more dada than Dali. In verses modeled on the nursery rhyme (``Margery, bargery, bow,/The monkey stubbed his toe./The clock struck three,/He spilled the tea...''), the hours advance to midnight (``Hickory, dickory, date''); meanwhile, in a room crowded with ornate objects (clocks are everywhere, their faces adorning wallpaper and glimmering atop hats), several animals (an elegant cat, a debonair masked mouse, a cow falling out of a picture that falls from the wall) engage in slapstick that's tenuously related to preparing for a celebration. The illustrations are rendered with artistry and precision, and children may enjoy trying to decode the goings on and checking out the synchronized clocks. But nonsense requires its own logic; ultimately, this effort is simply too incoherent to work. There are too many miscellaneous details, the verse isn't especially clever, and the absurdities are neither funny enough nor intriguing enough to be worth puzzling over. (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks Trade
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0590736167
• ISBN 13: 9780590736169
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 32