Whale (review)

Joe's little seaside town is wrecked when a huge whale miscalculates its aquatic gymnastics and bellyflops on top of the townsfolk's homes. Though the whale is fatalistic ("You may as well chop me in pieces. I would make a magnificent fish pie"), a determined Joe leads the townsfolk in the Rain Song, and the rain pours down with such force it floods the land, freeing the whale. Unfortunately, it also strands the flooded-out townsfolk on the whale's back, but the whale drinks enough of the seawater to lower the ocean again and enlists the help of an army of birds and sea creatures to set the swamped and broken town back to rights. While the ending tails off abruptly, the text deftly blends simple, straightforward sentences with stylistic elements of fairy tale and fable (guidance on the Whale's rescue comes from an Owl who gets a message from the Wind, who has spoken to the Sun, who spoke to the Moon, who spoke to the Innumerable Stars), and audiences will particularly appreciate the story's generosity with the appealing concept of surprising transformations, offering as it does three in total. Line-and-watercolor illustrations have a trim order, controlled palette, and taste for panels and vignettes appealingly suggestive of early twentieth-century comic strips, but the whale evinces genuine grandeur in his blue, squiggly-hatched magnificence that dominates most spreads in which he appears. The toylike red-roofed town seems sufficiently like a tantrum-wrecked playscape to evoke sympathetic familiarity rather than horror, and its shell-bedecked final incarnation will be a glittering thing of wonder to young viewers. Audiences taken with (or just approaching readiness for) the mysticism and animal subject of Kipling's Just So Stories will be drawn to this tale of a misadventuring leviathan.