Holbrook: A Lizard's Tale (review)

It's not easy being an artistic lizard in a desert full of non-appreciative reptiles, as Holbrook the lizard discovers when he tries to share one of his paintings with the residents of Rattler's Bend. Hoping to find a more welcoming art community, Holbrook sets out for an exhibition in Golden City. There he meets Count Rumolde, a mink who tricks Holbrook into believing he is the next great thing to hit the art scene, then ruthlessly adds him to the minions turning out tourist painting after tourist painting in his basement sweatshop. Holbrook manages to escape and, determined to tell the world about the horrors of the factory, he enlists a group of pigeons to execute his clever plan to save the artist slaves. Finally, Holbrook ends up in prison among a group of other artists (including the alluring Margot Frogtayne) all destined to become dinner, he cunningly talks the chef out of cooking them, Rumolde's labor abuse is exposed for all to see . . . and Holbrook lands the Most Promising Newcomer award for his painting "Starry Night." Many of Becker's characters are, as explained in an author's note, based upon historical figures (Vincent Van Gogh, Giacomo Puccini, T. S. Eliot, Rod McKuen), but most of the references will go right over the heads of the intended readership. Similarly, while the exploration of artistic intuition is indeed thoughtfully portrayed ("He wasn't trying to show how things looked; he was trying to show how they felt"), it's somewhat out of place among the fast-paced animal capers. It's the entertaining plotting that is the highlight of Holbrook's quest: time and time again, just when things seem to be going Holbrook's way, the carpet is pulled out from under him and he is left to get himself out of yet another sloppy situation. Carter's black-and-white pencil and wash illustrations, which offer humorous caricatures of the anthropomorphized animals, are fluid and dimensional, full of light and shadows. Despite the book's drawbacks, young readers may still cheer for this underdog champion as he wittily works his way through the trials of the artist as a young lizard.