SCRIBBLE reviews
Rockie Mountain News
Cookie Magazine If you’re like most parents, your home’s walls (and doors and appliances) are decked with countless crayon-on-construction-paper masterpieces. Creating artwork has special meaning for a child, and for many the pictures even take on lives of their own. That concept gets some mischievous élan in this imaginative book, which begins with two sisters, Emma and Lucie, sketching a regal-looking princess and a rudimentary kitty cat, respectively. When Emma criticizes her drawing, Lucie retaliates by scribbling all over her older sibling’s. Emma runs off to tattle, at which point the rules of reality are giddily dispensed with: Lucie’s cat decides to set things right, enlisting his creator in untangling the scribble that now surrounds the enchanted beauty. Freedman has a lot of fun with the illustrations, letting the realistically drawn human characters mingle with the two-dimensional scribbles to create a Roger Rabbit-meets-Harold and the Purple Crayon effect.
School Library Journal When Emma insults her younger sister's cat drawing by calling it a scribble, Lucie retaliates by drawing all over the older girl's picture of a sleeping princess. So begins the tale as Lucie follows Scribble Cat into Emma's drawing in search of the beautiful princess who is now obscured behind a tangled bramble of scribbles. After much difficulty, the lines are rolled into a ball and Scribble Cat awakens the sleeping princess with a kiss. Despite Emma's protestations that a kitty and a princess can't get married, they do anyway and live happily ever after. This fresh and imaginative story-within-a-story perfectly captures the logic and tone of children's dialogue, especially two arguing siblings. But the text is only half of the story. Freedman combines two wildly different drawing styles to great effect as she takes readers between reality and her characters' artwork. Her "real world" illustrations are reminiscent of Maurice Sendak's work complete with speech bubbles. The artist's attention to detail is excellent, making it easy to see that Lucie is sorry about ruining Emma's picture without a word being uttered. The amusing antics of Scribble Cat, who looks as though he's been drawn by a preschooler, come alive for readers. Having Lucie's real-world kitty join her in drawings adds another layer of entertainment. A fun and imaginative romp.
Publishers Weekly In this unpredictable blend of comic strip and children's drawings, two short-tempered siblings compare their magic marker artwork. Proud older sister Emma shows off her picture of a sleeping princess on bubblegum-pink poster paper. Defensive younger sister Lucie, less practiced with her pen, chooses mustard-gold paper and draws "a kitty" with a crude teardrop-shaped head and sticklike limbs. "It looks like a scribble," Emma tells her. Indignant, Lucie grabs a pen and scratches tangled loops, like twisted vines, all over Emma's Sleeping Beauty. This sibling squabble takes an unexpected turn, however, when Lucie's scrawled kitty, christened Scribble, decides to rescue the damsel. He leaps onto the pink page with Lucie and her actual pet kitten in hot pursuit. But "before Lucie could stop him, Scribble scrambled into a Giant Thicket, where deep within he discovered the Princess Aurora, who had been asleep for One Hundred Years." Scribble unravels the inky loops and finds an unlikely true love, a la Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line. Freedman, in her picture book debut, pictures the dueling sisters and their white kitten semi-naturalistically in pen, ink and watercolor, depicting their showdown in tidy comic panels with voice bubble dialogue. She creates their drawings in the naïve style of Lauren Child, and when Scribble comes to life, this anarchic, digitally enhanced art fills the pages and breaks the frames. The juxtaposition of realistic portraits and more playful designs results in often chaotic spreads, but Freedman's willingness to color outside the lines pays off - she's created a clever gem of a book.
Kirkus Reviews Two children's drawings come to life in a clear case of, as the blurb so aptly puts it, "scribbling rivalry." After big sister Emma makes a slighting comment about her "scribble-kitty," Lucie covers Emma's slightly more elaborate picture of a sleeping princess in furious scrawls of crayon. When Scribble-Kitty decides to see what a Princess looks like, though, the tangle of scrawls becomes an obstacle, and it's only with help from a repentant Lucie that the lines are pulled aside into a neat coil. When Kitty reaches the Princess and kisses her, she wakes up and they decide to get married. Coming back into view, Emma protests that they can't—"But they did anyway. And they all lived Happily Ever After. As drawings sometimes do." In panels that shift and overlap, the children are drawn realistically to keep the boundaries between real and play worlds separate—but like its ancestor Harold and the Purple Crayon, the unselfconscious (at least until the end) exploration of those boundaries here is liable to spark young imaginations. |
