THE BOY WHO BECAME A PARROT: A Foolish Biography of Edward Lear, Who Invented Nonsense, by Wolverton Hill; illustrated by Laura Carlin
If you’ve bought books for kids in the last year or 10, you may have noticed the tsunami of titles telling children to be kind, to be happy, to love everyone. These are nice ideas, and an understandable reaction to our current, very unkind times. But idea books are not stories; they’re not entertaining. They’re lectures.
“The Boy Who Became a Parrot” is, wonderfully, not a lecture but an absolute joy of a picture book — celebrating nonsense, play, art, storytelling and the life of the writer and artist Edward Lear.
You may know Lear as the author of the poem “The Owl and the Pussy-cat,” or of limericks like this one:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared! —
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”
But did you know that Lear, born in London in 1812, was the second youngest of (by many accounts) 21? An epilepsy sufferer? A naturalist painter admired by Audubon? Someone who felt such a kinship with parrots that he wished he could become one, and who often drew himself as a bird?
Wolverton Hill (the “nonsense twin” of the author Barry Wolverton, who “lives in the upper right hemisphere of Barry’s brain, on a small island, in the middle of the woods, with two chairs, half a candle and a jug without a handle”) tells the story of Lear’s life with a playfulness that echoes his subject’s own writings.
Likewise, the award-winning Laura Carlin’s visual storytelling — a seamless mix of full illustrations and sketchy doodles, her art and Lear’s — is not only exquisite but as exuberantly clever and goofy as that of the nonsense king himself.
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The post The Children’s Writer Who Drew Himself as a Bird appeared first on New York Times.
