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Book Summary

Reviewed by Patricia Tauzer

Slightly reminiscent of the man whose beard cradled bird's nests, this is a book about a man with hair that houses an outlandish world beyond imagination. When a young girl says he has crazy hair, the man goes off on a poetic tangent about all the creatures that live in his hair. She tries to comb it, but suddenly she is more than an observer.

Is It Any Good?

4

While the premise of this book is pretty far-fetched, the language dances through illustrations that are definitely eye-catching. Rhymes speak of tangles and twists of cockatoos, tigers, pirate sloops, and hunting expeditions; imaginative, and definitely unique, artwork depicts each crazy world. Together they build a bee-hive of fun in what might only be called a frenzy of fantasy.

Dave McKean's artwork is colorful and swirly, full of computer enhanced images and a kind of magic you can't quite put your finger on. Rather ugly and distorted at one moment, looking like comic book graphics at another, always with touches of the realistic, it stretches past the poetry toward the edge of somewhere very strange, all of which is quite appropriate to a world existing in a head of hair. If the poetry doesn't grab you, the octopus-like tendrils of tresses certainly will. Just ask Bonnie.

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