A Mama for Owen (review)

Owen the baby hippo has become quite the literary celebrity these days (see Hatkoff's Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship, BCCB 5/06, or Winter's Mama, BCCB 5/06); here veteran author Bauer takes a more fictional look at his popular story. The book starts by chronicling Owen's happy life with his mother, which comes to a sudden end when "the rain fell and it fell and it fell," swelling the river until it washes Owen and his mother out to sea. When the waves wash him alone back in again, a lonely Owen finds a tortoise, colored and shaped just like Owen's mother, and he adopts Mzee as his new mother. The story suffers from indeterminate genre—it's too factual to be simply fiction and too fictional to work as a true story (the tale elides over factual details such as human intervention and Owen's move to the wildlife park, as here he basically finds Mzee on his own when he's washed up), and it's reductive in its flat insistence that Mzee is a mother substitute; nonetheless, it's a well-spun story with gentle repetition and careful structuring bolstering the telling. Soft, misty textures and dusty lilac tones predominate in the acrylic and colored-pencil illustrations, wherein the modestly anthropomorphized hippo and tortoise beam like contented boulders; the result is a little on the sweet side—it's the prettiest tsunami ever seen—but it's also visually uncluttered and darn near kid-irresistible. While kids will likely recognize that the story isn't, in cold examination, quite as upbeat as the telling, this softly cushioned account may be a useful version for audiences not old enough for the more informative Hatkoff book. A brief author's note fills in some of the factual blanks in the story.