The Pigeon Needs a Bath! by Mo Willems (review)

Throughout all of his previous adventures, the Pigeon has shown a remarkable ability to keep his blue feathers pristine and unsullied. Not so here: the Pigeon appears on the cover smudged with dark brown stains of an unspecified origin (now there’s a pre-reading question in the making—how did our friend get so dirty?—a question answered in the endpapers, of course). The bus driver, wearing Knuffle Bunny slippers and obviously prepped for a bath of his own, solicits the help of the audience to convince the reluctant pigeon to bathe, and it’s game on. Deploying his formidable skills of argumentation, the pigeon offers up a number of reasons why he should not have to take a bath, but when even the flies buzzing around him are put off by his stench, he gives in. After getting the water juuuuuust right (oh, those endless delaying tactics all too familiar to the parent of the bath-averse!), he realizes that he loves taking a bath, especially when his friend, the duckling, stays close by. The comic pleasures of hyperbole abound here as they have in previous Pigeon plots; the bird’s rhetorical inventiveness seems to know no limit (in fact, the vocabulary here is somewhat more advanced than in previous Pigeon titles). The familiar creamy-smooth backgrounds impart a simple reinforcement of the dirt motif by being more earthy than usual, while the smears of dirt on our hero have a textured, uneven quality that unerringly evokes a more visceral, lip-curling eeeuw; close viewers will surely find a favorite panel. If only it came in a waterproof edition …