Once Upon a Banana

I go to the library every week and check out as many books as the library will let me to share with my daughters ages six and two. I carefully go through the shelves book by book and choose ones that look interesting and age appropriate. Every once in awhile, I stumble on a book that stands out from the rest. This was one of those books. I saw this one and thought it looked cute and put it in the bag. After I got home and had the chance to sit down and really look at it, I felt like I had discovered a hidden treasure. The story, told all in pictures, is so fun and entertaining I fell in love with it. It is the kind of book you can look at over and over and discover things you missed each time. I am adding this to my list of all time favorite kids books. The author and artist have come up with such a clever and fun story, I wish I could tell them personally what a great work they have done. I highly recommend sharing this book with a little one in your life. My girls loved it!

Given the scarcity of time most parents are able to eek out with their children today, how we spend that time is all the more important. Tucking away in a corner with a good book and a child is bliss, especially when the child is actually interested and tuned in to the book at hand. Once Upon a Banana is a perfect book for any person over one. Recently a barely two year old and I spent 20 minutes enjoying the insightful detail of David Small's wonderful drawings. We pointed out all that was going on, and followed the various characters as they tumbled through the pages. The monkey became an instant highlight, and she searched for him on every page. I notice that the trend seems to peg this book at the 4 to 8 year old range. In our experience, well crafted, beautiful and detailed drawings can be very powerful for young minds just learning to look out and notice the world around them. As someone who's worked with children for more than 20 years, I'd encourage parents to seek out books like this one; books filled with art and insight. David Small seems to understand what children, and adults, really want to see when they peer out into the world through picture books.

Once upon a banana peal. Very funny =- the "Rube Goldberg" of all children's books. Good for 4 to 8 year-olds.

Jennifer Armstrong's ONCE UPON A BANANA will appeal to ages 4-8 with its story of how one banana turns a town upside down. Caldecott artist David Small and Jennifer Armstrong provide a rollicking story of fun in a wordless picturebook set of zany images.

There is a laughable perception that wordless picture books are easier to write, read, and review than their wordy brethren. What a cute idea. The truth of the matter is that it's hard to think of anything intended for a young audience that is more difficult to put together. When a wordless tale is simple, like Barbara Lehman's, "The Red Book", your average everyday reviewer can fall back on the simple post-modernism of it all. "Once Upon a Banana" by Jennifer Armstrong, however, borders on the insane. The details by illustrator David Small coupled with the plain good storytelling (and amazing absence of true bodily injury) makes this book a kind of contemporary silent film that'll have no difficulty entertaining your pint-sized Buster Keatons. Once you begin to take in its complexity and sheer good nature, however, you cease to be merely amused and end up sincerely impressed. In the beginning it's just a man and his monkey, eeking out a living on the street. The man juggles and the monkey, seeing a delicious banana sitting at a greengrocer's stall, takes off like a shot so as to get a taste. The man is quick to give chase but the monkey has already begun to cut a swath of destruction in its wake. By merely eating the banana and tossing its peel to one side, a burly motorcyclist slips and crashes into a ladder. That ladder, in turn, has a painter on it who falls backwards into a full shopping cart of vegetables on a downward slope. Suddenly we've left the man and monkey and are watching as the cart crashes into a bicyclist, distracting a judge, who steps on a boy's skateboard, and in the process detaches a baby from its caregiver. Eventually the baby goes flying, the city streets are a mess, and in a glorious twist of fate that defies description, the world explodes into a fabulous burst of bananas bananas bananas. A person could ramble on about details and the sheer number of them in this book, but I can't really drill that idea home to you unless I point out the clever way in which the story in this book is told. This is the only picture book I can think of that begins its tale on the cover. See the juggler and his monkey? Open that same cover and ALREADY the monkey has made a break for it. That cheeky monkey didn't even wait for the publication information to make an appearance. BOOM! Monkey gone. It gets more nutty still when you see that a motorcycle couple watching the now disappearing primate have inadvertently driven right onto the front bookflap of the book. Then the story continues and all is well just until you get to the very end of the story. There, for the meticulous souls amongst us (and I am certain that there are quite a few) is the map of the city block on which all this took place. And there, on the BACK bookflap, are Laurel and Hardy continuing a visual gag you may not have even noticed nine pages before the end of the book. THAT is what it means to take your work seriously. THAT is storytelling in