Mother Goose Eggs

Sunnyside Up

Par (auteur) Jim Westergard
Catégories: Art
Éditeur: Porcupine's Quill
Paperback : 9780889842694, 64 pages, Mars 2005

`The Westergard book is such a goofy delight!`

La description

Those who love Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies or Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children will adore Jim Westergard’s darkly comic portraits. He illustrates each nursery rhyme twice. First, we meet the young and not-so-innocent heroes of the poems. Then we see them in their retirement, in a rogue’s gallery of unrepentant outcasts, crones and sociopaths.

Reviews

`Mother Goose Eggs is thoughtful and expertly researched. A reader may pause to consider what life was like when the original poems were written. They may have been historical accounts of the tribulations that different societies and cultures endured in the past. Westergard has put doubt into our minds as to the innocence of children`s stories and parents everywhere should be on guard!`

- Andrea Mackay

`There is a laugh on every page. `

- Marc Horton

`Great attention has been taken with the production of the book. It is printed on wonderful cream paper stock, with a special type font and decorated initial letters, as well as carefully laid-out pages. The original wood engravings are well-executed portraits. However, while some adults may appreciate the bizarre dark humour, this is not a book to share with children. `

- Alison Mews

`As Bruno Bettelheim explained in The Uses of Enchantment, nursery rhymes and fairy tales confront children head-on with basic human predicaments and existential dilemmas. They exaggerate and distort but they do not try to hide the filthy underbelly of the world -- people`s backs are broken, mice are mutilated. Westergard has great, socially incisive fun by taking the rhymes at their straight-faced literal level, thereby backhandedly pointing to our hyper-protective culture of parenting. He underscores the daftness of making strictly deterministic connections between what is read in childhood and one`s life as an adult. `

- Christopher Wiebe

`Jim Westergard may not be the first to invest children`s standards with modern sensibilities (think Jon Scieszka`s The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs or James Finn Garner`s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories), but he achieves a special blend of sarcasm and poignancy in Mother Goose Eggs, Sunnyside Up. The book pairs 25 Mother Goose nursery rhymes (many of which include an unfamiliar and disturbing stanza or two) with Westergard`s engravings. With tongue in cheek, Westergard plays up the cruel nature of many classic nursery rhymes -- spousal abuse in ``Tom, Tom, of Islington``, child neglect in ``Hush a by Baby``, and religious oppression in ``Goosey, Goosey, Gander``, for example. He illustrates each rhyme with a two-colour portrait and a larger, black-and-white depiction of the young protagonist as they might have aged -- which is usually not very well. `

- Quill and Quire