Tale of Tulips, Tale of Onions [With 2 MLS Notes by Illustrator]

Amid the tulipomania craze in seventeenth-century Holland, gardener Ed Vard Grooter's love of tulips and sea captain Drooter Van Zooter's love of onions almost bring them to blows

Grade 3-5-In this tale (or is it two) of 17th-century Holland, Ed Vard Grooter is a man who loves tulips, and Captain Drooter van Zooter is mad for onions. While Grooter exclaims over every rumor of a new and "bizarre" tulip, Zooter sails off to Kracka-toe-Krack with a shipload of cats and onions. Grooter's triumphant discovery of a truly bizarre tulip in his own garden coincides with the return of a battered, half-starved Captain van Zooter. He is so hungry for onions that he eats Grooter's tulip bulb in error and is threatened with violence by its owner. All ends happily as the whole of Holland is discovered to be blooming with variegated tulips, and Grooter's daughter promises to marry the Captain and cook onions for him forever. Birchman's melodramatic comedy is loosely based on the history of Holland's tulipomania in the 17th century, and on the similarities in appearance of an onion and a tulip bulb. This picture book relies heavily on exaggerated word play and repetition for comic effect. The illustrations place the action on a theater stage, with succeeding acts alternating between tulips and onions, played out before a dimly seen audience. While full of action-packed scenes and colorfully costumed actors, the book tries too hard to blend history, slapstick humor, and drama. The result is a chaotic and contrived comedy of absurd events and posturing characters, too silly for older readers and too obscure in its historical references and allusions to Dutch art for younger ones.
Shirley Wilton, Ocean County College, Toms River, NJ
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a truly "dramatic" presentation, Hunt ( Jumbo ) illustrates two linked stories set in 17th-century Holland as a 1920s melodrama, played out upon a stage. Gretel Grooter loves to paint; her father Ed Vard Grooter loves tulips. Gretel also loves Captain Drooter van Zooter, who loves onions. But alas, "Meener Horst Hilder, owner of the Gulden Guilder , a flute that flew the seven seas (sailing moo cows to the Moluccan Isles and loads of spice to the Zeiderzees)," hires Gretel's beloved for a lengthy voyage to Kracka-toe-Krack. On Drooter's much-wished-for return, further obstacles to the course of true love are created when he mistakes a rare tulip bulb for an onion, but these are soon overshadowed by the collapse of tulipomania. Amid general celebration, the curtain descends. All very clever, full of wordplay, romance, history (with an endnote on Holland's tulipomania of 1634-1637), and even a cumulative element as Ed Vard calculates the spiraling value of different tulip rarities in terms of farm animals. So much cleverness, unfortunately, calls attention to itself, though admirers of the team's Victorious Paints the Great Balloon will enjoy. Ages 6-9.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.