We Can't Have Nice Things

Crappy children's book of the week: Here Comes Eloise!

"Here Comes Eloise" is a charming little story about a budding sociopath on roller skates who delights in tormenting the doomed employees of The Plaza, the snooty hotel where she lives. The book follows the little hellion as she menaces hotel guests with a luggage cart, steals the contents of other people's packages, abuses the kitchen staff, and ruins a wedding.

Apparently even her parents can't stand to spend more than five minutes with the little turd because they've left her in the care of some bitter old crone called Nanny, who does nothing to curb the girl's destructive tendencies. Even as an angry mob descends on Eloise's apartment, ostensibly to mete out some frontier justice, Nanny heads them off allowing Eloise to continue to run amuck.

The last page shows her pouring a carafe of milk down the hotel mail chute while saying, "Oooooooooooooo, I absolutely love The Plaza!" Disturbing.

The only redeeming quality of the book is the fact that it's about four pages long and has about 20 words in it.

Crappy children's book of the week

We have a lot of childrens' books. Some of them are classics like McElligot's Pool, Cordoroy, and Where The Wild Things Are. Some of the others are really, really stupid.

This week's crappy children's book is Diego's Safari Rescue starring (can you say that about a book?) Diego of Go, Diego, Go! My son loves what's-his-name, but this book is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. You know those shows on Cartoon Network Adult Swim that are targeted towards people that are high? This is the children book equivalent.

Diego and his sister Alicia go to Serengeti to help their friend Juma rescue elephants. Will they be battling poachers? Curing sick animals? Chasing off circus owners? Nope:

Juma says that a long time ago, the Serengeti in Africa had lots and lots of elephants... All of the animals loved the elephants -- except for one mosquito who found a magic wand and changed herself into a magician.

The magician didn't like elephants, so she used her magic want to turn them into giant rocks!

OK, that's just weird.

So what's Diego's solution to this ecological tragedy? His friend Juma tells him that there's a magic drum that can break the spell hidden in a cave at the top of the tallest mountain so he transforms his backpack into a hot air balloon and flies up to the top of the mountain and finds an elephant living in the cave in order to hide from the magician who was previously a mosquito. Got that?

They find the drum and make their way back to the elephant rocks but not before they help giraffes with short necks, zebras with no stripes and hippos that had been miniaturized -- all by the evil magician. Unfortunately they couldn't do anything for the squirrel monkey with huge testicles.

Suffice it to say, everything turns out ok and the mosquito "says she missed being a mosquito and (will) never do mean things again." That's convenient.

The thing that bothers me the most is that you expect this book to have some sort of real environmental message. Instead it bravely confronts the scourge that is insect witchcraft. Well done.