There Is a Tribe of Kids by Lane Smith (review)

A boy clad only in leaves makes friends, sequentially, with a colony of penguins, a pod of whales, a smack of jellyfish, and other collective nouns as he travels. After a contemplative night under a family of stars and an ocean of blue, he finds a trail of shells, which leads him to a tribe of kids, who embrace him and eagerly participate as he acts out the story of his journey. The text, which is a sequence of expletive constructions (“There was a parade of elephants. There was a troop of monkeys”), becomes stale with excessive repetition, and the collective nouns vary muddlingly from technical to artistic. The story really lies in the art, though, as the mixed-media illustrations, often divided into panels, show our hero joining up with various animal groups and then departing from them; mottled textures and a subdued earthtoned palette provide an organic feel as the kid wanders the globe. There are comic touches in the boy’s relationship with his temporary pals (even on hands and knees he speeds past the turtles; his musical troop of monkeys gets faced down by an imperious band of gorillas) and some moments of wonder as the boy faces the wide world on his own. While it doesn’t hang together as well as it might, audiences may enjoy decoding the story in the art and the final celebratory kid collective.