J. Patrick Lewis
Christopher Myers's take on the greatest nonsense verse in the English-speaking world—a basketball face-off—combines brio and whimsy with more energy than a power forward…Award-winning books like Blues Journey, Jazz and Harlem, his Caldecott Honor book (these three were written by his father, Walter Dean Myers), have earned for Myers's art a grand and growing reputation. His Jabberwocky reflects once more his signature style and his willingness to take risks.
—The New York Times
Abby McGanney Nolan
…cleverly contemporizes the battle by setting it on a playground basketball court.…Myers's colors are bold and bright, his defined figures springing from watercolor-wash backgrounds and the typeface of the words conveying a jagged urgency.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Stewart's (The Adventures of a Nose) mixed media art is as winsome, witty and wacky as Carroll's tongue-tripping poem, which first appeared in the pages of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There in 1872. The opening spread features the entire poem on one page, opposite a sepia-toned, Edward Gorey-esque portrait of a boy dancing on the arm of the chair in which his proper father sits holding a large open book on his lap. A flip of the page catapults readers into the land of the Jabberwock (" 'Twas brillig...), in living color. The verse continues, line by line: vest-wearing, long-tailed "slithy toves" frolic among the trees and blue-beak-nosed "borogoves" swing peacefully in hammocks while fairy-like "mome raths outgrabe" (or play musical instruments, according to Stewart's interpretation). Signs posted on trees ("Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!") as well as a background image of the wide-mouthed villain, with red-and-white striped tail and lips, hint at the trouble to come. Alas, the cherubic child from the opening portrait, here bedecked in striped pantaloons and helmet, uses his sword masterfully to slay the creature (who turns out to be robotic, not flesh and blood). The young hero then goes "galumphing back" to celebrate with the slithy toves before nodding off with the borogoves, as narrative and visuals return to their idyllic starting point. A fittingly fanciful interpretation of this classic nonsense verse. Ages 4-7. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
School Library Journal
PreS-Gr 4-Carroll's classic nonsense poem gets a fresh visual interpretation here. In a series of spreads, a child mounts his quest for the fearsome Jabberwock in an "other" world in keeping with the delicious unknown conjured up on first hearing, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves-." After a glimpse of the hero, the real world shows up in the form of facing oval frames-one containing the poem, the other a Victorian father-and-son read-aloud scene. But from then on, with a few lines of the poem per page, children enter a spare landscape of rattan-printed trees, postage-stamp-sized art, and full-color ink-and-watercolor creatures whose simple, almost cartoonish look echoes Edward Lear's comic sketches. The uncluttered composition of these pages leaves plenty of room for Carroll's words to do their work. Printed in uppercase, in a faintly rune-ish serif typeface, they gyre and gimble, whiffle and burble cleanly across the page. Stewart has not paid precise attention to Humpty Dumpty's explication of the poem as it originally appears in Through the Looking-Glass, but he has captured that wordmeister's affinity for conglomeration and arbitrary meaning, creating his own odd creatures to inhabit Carroll's perfect peculiarities. The slightly removed tone is maintained by a climactic twist: when the vorpal blade snicker-snacks "through and through," the beast's innards are revealed to be mechanical-clockwork springs and gears. Other illustrated editions worth considering-Graeme Base's (Abrams, 1989) signature packed pages or Jane Breskin Zalben's (Warne, 1977; o.p.) delicately detailed watercolors-hew more closely to Humpty Dumpty's definitions, but this new version is a good choice for a younger audience, nicely conveying the lighthearted mysteriousness of the poem.-Nancy Palmer, The Little School, Bellevue, WA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
From the Publisher
"'Tis a brillig sendoff; fans of all things toothy and terrifying will gyre and gimble in its wabe."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"The skillful use of color, light, and shadow makes the setting look otherworldly and the dramatic scenes all the more powerful. A vivid interpretation of the classic poem."—Booklist
"For those who like their nonsense epic and just a bit gory, the large scale scenes of glowering creatures and a triumphant warrior give new life to the poem."—School Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-10-21
A young hero takes on a truly humongous monster in the late Santore’s final, probably, and most melodramatic set of illustrations.
Nobly posed in a three-quarter-length portrait at the beginning, the White-presenting hero looks more wiry than ripped for all his bare chest and granite jaw—not the most likely sort to stand a chance against the immense, slavering, crocodilian beast that pounces in the climactic double gatefold. Still, one hack of the jeweled vorpal blade later, the creature’s minivan-sized head lies in a pool of gore. (How the hero contrives to go galumphing back with it is left to the imagination, as in the next scene he’s already raising his arms in triumph amid a cloud of parrotlike slithy toves to a chortled offstage “Callooh! Callay!”) Being positively crowded with artfully detailed tortoises, sundials, and badgerlike creatures with long, pointy noses, the dim and mossy tulgey wood makes a properly surreal setting; for extra monster thrills the artist inserts separate outsized views of the likewise slavering Bandersnatch, part boar and part tiger, and a fantastically plumed and toothy Jubjub bird that looks as if it could have a T. rex for breakfast. In his note the artist discusses his approach to the nonsense poem and properly echoes Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in encouraging readers to realize that “the words mean what they sound.”
’Tis a brillig sendoff; fans of all things toothy and terrifying will gyre and gimble in its wabe. (Picture book poem. 6-10)
