Oct 01, 2007 09:25 PM
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(Updated Oct 01, 2007 09:34 PM)
What Aunts Do Best/What Uncles Do Best
What Aunts Do Best/What Uncles Do Best by was written by Laura Numeroff.
The publishers are Simon & Schuster. It has 32 pages and I bought if for$12.00
The Plot:
Richardson's marching aunts arrive in waves at the home of Pop, the distraught father character. They come in all sizes, shapes and costumes, and each is playing a musical instrument to which she marches. Poor Pop. "To the guest room, please, " he pleads. We cannot read the book without humming the tune; even without Cynthia Nugent's busy colourful illustrations the story would be loud and bright.
The aunts are not hugely represented in children's literature, but those you'll find are usually memorable. Sometimes they have the same role as the stepmother - the "bad" foil to the "good" mother - such as, for example, cold and severe Aunt Polly opposing cheerful Pollyanna.
These aunts are relentless and irresistible in their exuberance. They bring to mind another crazy aunt who appears in current children's picture books: Aunt Olga in Kevin Major's Aunt Olga's Christmas Postcards, a gentle tale about a 95-year-old aunt going dotty in a way that doesn't at all lessen her appeal for her niece, Anna.
Aunts often have important supporting roles in the sprawling family sagas of Victorian fiction. Henry James and E.M. Forster seem to like aunt-figures - maybe because they themselves lived outside conventional family life. Like Richardson's own bachelor brothers, aunts are brought out when peripheral rather than nuclear family members are needed.(Green's globetrotting Aunt Augusta was really Henry's mother, and escaped from the nucleus to the liberating periphery by giving him up at birth.)
The Author:
Lives in Victoria and is now a writer and former librarian.
What I thought:
Laura Numeroff also presents fun aunts(and uncles) in What Aunts Do Best/What Uncles Do Best. What they do is take you to the fair and the mall and, like Richardson's aunts, make music.
Numeroff's positive celebration of aunts is very different from Victoria writer Polly Horvath's recent darkly hilarious portrayal of Magnolia and Pigg in The Vacation. These were the quite gruesome relatives poor Henry had to travel with on a road trip taken one summer while his parents were away in Africa. This wasn't Horvath's first outrageous aunt pair: in The Canning Season, Ratchet, also sent away by a feckless mother, had to live in a remote part of Maine with the eccentric and quite fantastical great-aunt twins Tilly and Penpen. Surviving that turn of events, Ratchet wins independence and friendship while she works through the canning season.
These aunts are somewhat menacing figures. In adult literature, comparably striking aunts would include that other Henry's Aunt Augusta, in Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple was also an aunt, whose nephew appears in some of the mysteries she solves
I recomend it.
Thanks for reading my review:
Lyla
