Children's Book That Shouldn't Be Judged By Its Cover

My daughter loves all things puppy. At a friend’s house tonight I saw Yoshitomo Nara’s children’s book, The Lonesome Puppy, and thought, “wow, gotta get that!” Then I opened it up and read it. It’s just plain weird.

I love Nara’s artwork, or at least I have in the past. Nara is one of the best known Japanese contemporary artists and his work is shown in top galleries and museums around the world.

The cover of the book is great: an adorable drawing of a puppy in Nara’s signature warped cartoonish style is wonderful. However, once you open the book and start reading the story, it’s just plain odd. Now, I’ve read a few children’s books in my 2 years of having a baby and some are boring, some fascinating. This one just seemed to take a bad idea and keep going and going and going.

Here’s the gist, not that you really need to know. A puppy, who is so big he straddles the world with one foot in one continent and one foot in another, is lonely because he has no friends. See, he’s so big, no one can see him. Until one day this little girl does see him. She climbs up him and befriends him. She’s scared at first but then she sings to him and they become fast friends. The moral of the story, it seems, is that there is always a friend out there for you – you just have to find them or they you.

Boiled down it doesn’t seem so bad, but when you’re reading the book, it is. It just is. However much I applaud the idea of teaching our children to see past another person’s physical “oddities” to who they are underneath, this story misses the mark for me.

Plus, the artwork in the rest of the book didn’t strike me as fanciful as the cover. The little girl looks, well, evil, and the puppy never manages to capture the whimsy of the one on the cover. Maybe I’m being too hard on it, but I can’t imagine reading this book over and over again when I can barely get through the first reading of it.

That being said, every single person who has reviewed the book on Amazon loves it, so maybe I’m missing something. My friend’s daughter also LOVES this book. She keeps asking for it, much to the chagrin of her mother…so, there you go, maybe Nara is actually on to something and I’m too adult to see it. But still, it won’t be on our bookshelf anytime soon.