Arlene Sardine 0 Edition

Focus: Something Smells Fishy Here

The Books for Youth staff, along with two contributing reviewers, were looking at recent arrivals when the new Chris Raschka book caught our attention. As the book was passed from one to another, each of our reactions was exactly the same–this has got to be some sort of a bad joke, right?

The book in question is Arlene Sardine 0 Edition. It follows the life–and death–of a sardine. Named Arlene. It begins, “So you want to be a sardine.” Although this is a concept that probably has not occurred to young children, they will be even less likely to want to be one after they are introduced to this book.

Although Arlene begins her life as a brisling in a fjord with 10,000 friends, when she is two, she is “grown-up enough to become a sardine.” This is not a good career move for Arlene, since it involves being caught in a net (“a big net, a purse net, a big purse net”), left without food and water for three days, and emptied out on the deck of the boat–dying.

That’s the bad news for Arlene. The good news is that she is put on ice with her friends and shipped off to the factory. One might assume that once the story’s heroine is dead, there would be a lull in the action, but no. Arlene must be graded by size, bathed in brine, and then smoked: “Then she was smoked, delicately. She was delicately smoked. Delicately smoked was she.”

Raschka opines that Arlene feels “well-rested on the conveyer belt.” He has no opinion about her frame of mind as she was packed in her can, but he does wonder if she was nervous before her final inspection. Since the illustrations depict a canned dead fish, this seems unlikely. As, perhaps, a celebratory statement about the circle of life, the final pages proclaim: “Arlene was a sardine. A sardine is what Arlene was.”

The best part of the book is its design and illustrations. Blocks and splashes of color against foam-white pages make an almost jaunty background for the action. Still, though a page or two of sardines might elicit a certain curiosity among readers, after 40 pages, sardines tend to look the same. Especially the dead ones.

The negative reaction of the Booklist staff was so immediate and sharp for several reasons. Subject matter, yes, but then there are all sorts of books written on arcane subjects. Sometimes they work. But Arlene’s life cycle, the high point of which is dying and being stuffed into a can, seems a dubious topic upon which to write a book for preschoolers. Older children, who, one might desperately argue, have a more inherent interest in sardines, would find the book’s design babyish. One suspects the natural audience for this is adults, who may want to buy it as a campy gift.

The other thing that is so offensive about the book is that it smacks of the emperor’s-new-clothes syndrome. Could anyone besides a well-respected author/illustrator get away with getting something like this published? Suppose a novice writer sends in a book over the transom. It’s called Arlene Sardine 0 Edition. It contains such lines as, “Arlene was covered in oil, olive oil, closed up with no air inside, hermetically, and cooked in her can.” A book like this from a no-name author would be returned faster than you could down a sardine. And rightfully so.

Not every book by every author (even well-respected ones) can be a success. And, certainly, to advance children’s literature, chances need to be taken by writers, illustrators, and publishers. But this seems to us to be not an effort to try something new and different but an attempt to can something, slap the Chris Raschka label on it, and hope it sells. We’re here to say, “Buyer Beware.” Ilene Cooper

Raschka (Simple Gifts, p. 273, etc.) has a way of continually reinventing the picture-book form; here, in his signature splashy watercolors and brash calligraphy, he tells the story of how Arlene, a little fish who wants to be a sardine, achieves her career goal. Along the way, readers learn how brislings are caught, killed, pickled, and canned; they also discover the different ways sardines are laid out in their containers. These facts are presented in an insouciant rhythm fully invested with Arlene’s fishy personality: “A little fish/packed in oil,/in a can,/is a/sardine./Arlene/was a sardine./A sardine/is what Arlene/was.” The book’s jacket, not incidentally, is painted to look like, read as, and “open” like the tin lid of a sardine can; the entire book bristles with nonchalance, but makes its points with panache. (Picture book. 3-8) — Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.