What Do Parents Do (When You're Not Home)? (review)

The narrator and his little sister are taking off for a night at their grandparents, and the minute his parents are left in the house alone, the grownups "do exactly what they always tell us not to do." Adult mischief includes jumping on the bed (with their shoes on!), sledding downstairs on pillows, messing up the kitchen while making huge snacks, wasting their time on videogames, and enjoying a rousing indoor game of basketball. When the kids return, the poker-faced parents insist they did "nothing much" in their offspring's absence, but they're also eager to know when their kids' next overnight might be. It's not entirely clear how the narrator knows what's going on if he's elsewhere, but kids will immediately get the joke, and Ransom is particularly adept at echoing parental admonitions ("That's not the way we treat pillows in our house. . . . You'd think by now they would have learned to share! . . . Is that the best use of their time?") as the kid comments on his parents' behavior. The watercolor and pencil illustrations counterpoint the chaotic scenes of parental mischief with vignettes of the kids' comparatively decorous behavior at their grandparents' (though that's a contrast that could have been made even clearer); sometimes the scenes tip from gleefully frenzied into visual confusion, but kids will giggle at the parental silliness and the visual clues to the parental mayhem remaining in the final scenes. Kids often draw a blank in their notion of how grownups occupy themselves away from their youngsters, and this will elicit giggles even as it confirms some secret suspicions on the matter.