In this story within a ballet within an orchestral suite, Lithgow (The Remarkable Farkle McBride) adapts to picture-book form a rhyming narration of composer Camille Saint-Saëns's 1886 composition Carnival of the Animals, which the author originated for the New York City Ballet last year (a music recording along with the author's ebullient narration accompanies the book). The resulting read-aloud takes a flight of fancy as well as a few leaps of logic. During a field trip to a natural history museum, Oliver Pendleton Percy the Third sneaks away from his class and hides among the taxidermic beasts in an exhibit labeled "under repairs." After closing, as Oliver sleeps with the fishes—and antelopes, bears and beavers—the boy dreams that the various people in his life take on the guise of the museum animals. His classmates morph into a pack of rule-breaking hyenas, his teacher a lion and his mother a tearful cuckoo searching for her chick. A kindly night watchman eventually facilitates Oliver's safe return home. Lithgow gleefully tackles the challenge of inventing a child-friendly story around the music's imagery. His penchant for employing often sophisticated and fun-to-pronounce words remains intact. However, as a stand-alone text, the dreamlike quality of the poem makes for some disjointed, stream-of-consciousness vignettes that may leave some readers scratching their heads. In addition, the author occasionally bends the story line to fit the rhyme scheme, with mixed success. Kulikov's (Morris the Artist) artwork acts as the glue here. He gamely stays in step, providing a fanciful plumed and furry menagerie of wild animal-human hybrids. His sophisticated yet playful treatment of size and perspective—along with copious humorous details—will have readers poring over many of the compositions. Ages 5-10.
From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 2–This absurdist fantasy at first explodes off the page like a well-shaken bottle of champagne, but fizzles into a sappy mess by the end. Drawing on Camille Saint-Saëns's suite, Lithgow has concocted a story in which young Oliver, left behind in the Natural History Museum after a class trip, is visited by dreams of his classmates, teachers, and extended family members transformed into the animals they most closely resemble. Lithgow's stanzas, at their best, recall the giddy hilarity of Edward Lear, as when he describes "The ferrets and badgers and weasels and rats/Were sticky-faced toddlers and snotty-nosed brats,/A species that always drove Oliver bats:/The Greater New York younger sibling." The moments of humor, slapstick, and charm clash with the darker ones–Oliver's terrifyingly toothy music teacher looming over him at the piano, the image of the bird-woman weeping over her empty nest, for example–without ever jelling into something coherent: a story. It's a shame that the text doesn't live up to Kulikov's splendidly rich and vibrant watercolor-and-gouache illustrations, which are uniformly excellent. At the book's end, of course, Oliver is delivered safely into the arms of his relieved parents, but due to the lack of plot, it's a strangely unsatisfying conclusion. Lithgow's narration, included on a CD at the back of the book, is as zany and inspired as always.–Sophie R. Brookover, Camden County Library, Voorhees, NJ
