Oregon's Journey

Duke, a circus dwarf, takes Oregon, a circus bear, back home to Oregon

Ages 5-8. The circus has always been a metaphor for nonconformists and wild creatures trapped and forced to entertain the crowd. The simple words and moving illustrations of this large-size picture book deliberately evoke images of fairy tales as well as of artists, from Van Gogh's cornfield to Robert Frost's snowy woods and Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." A dwarf named Duke and a performing bear leave the circus ring and travel west to freedom in the snowy forests of Oregon. The dwarf, in clown face, tells how they hitch rides with other loners on the edge of society. Unlike Bushnell's Circus of the Wolves , about a man who helps a wolf escape, this is not a realistic story. Here the bear is part of the man, his other self; several pictures show that the bear is a huge shadow of the little clown. The bear talks, but only the clown hears him, and no one on the journey sees the great bear at the man's side. There's some sentimentality in the return to the idyllic wilderness from the polluted city, but children will be moved by the fantasy and the dwarf's yearning that he might meet Snow White. When a truck driver asks Duke why he wears his white makeup and red nose even when he's left the circus, he replies, "Because they've become a part of me. . . . It isn't easy being a dwarf." There's something of Chaplin in this melancholy outsider's search for home. Hazel Rochman