Bright and Early Thursday Evening: A Tangled Tale - Hardcover

Wood, Audrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0152003630 ISBN 13: 9780152003630

Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers, 1996

Synopsis

Follow me--You go first!--into a whimsical dream of talking vegetables, sad weddings, happy funerals, and poor billionaires, a place where we can all sit down to dance. This oxymoron-laden tale combined with illustrations rendered using state-of-the-art digital technology is sure to amaze and delight one and all. “A potent combination of technology and creativity.”--Publishers Weekly

About this title

About the Author

Audrey Wood is the author of many beloved books for children, including the bestselling classic The Napping House, its companion The Full Moon at the Napping House, Caldecott Honor Book King Bidgood's in the Bathtub, Heckedy Peg, Piggies, and Piggy Pie Po, all of which were illustrated by her husband, Don Wood. The Woods divide their time between California and Hawaii.  

From School Library Journal

Grade 1-4?With no more than a handful of words on a page?but with a vocabulary that includes gabardine, remorse, and gelatin?Wood has created a "Jabberwocky"-like poem. However, this verse is anything but whimsical, despite its "Oh, Susanna" contradictions. "Bright and early Thursday Evening,/I woke up and dreamed I was dead"; to this half of the opening quatrain, Don Wood adds an electronic collage of a young woman covered in flowers waking up on a skull-posted bed. This "tangled tale" is fantasy with an edge. The Napping House (Harcourt, 1984) crowd won't get it, but most likely will innocently delight in the theater of the absurd, where a crocodile accuses a laughing lady in candy-striped tights and a tutu of eating his best friend, all overacted on an opera-house stage in front of a full house of flamingos. Skeletons and a baby (dropped off by a crane), a bushy-eyed crescent moon, an Idaho potato, prancing clocks, and an egg-laying rooster are all cast in the author's dreamlike vision and realized in the artist's imagination, but what, one wonders, is the point? Filled mostly with bright and bold digital art?save the macabre dungeon scene?this book is a curious experiment both in medium and message created by a superbly talented couple. Its ostentatious surrealism is intrinsically appealing, but its undeniable dark side may disturb some children and adults.?John Sigwald, Unger Memorial Library, Plainview, TX
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0152003630
• ISBN 13: 9780152003630
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Wood Don