Prudence Wants a Pet (review)

When Prudence’s parents forbid her a pet, she tests out some creative alternatives. Unfortunately, her attempts all founder: Branch the branch trips her father and goes to the woodshed—literally; Formal Footwear the old shoe lacks interactivity; and her little brother, Milo, doesn’t respond well to his grass-and-seeds diet. Fortunately, Prudence’s efforts are enough to convince her parents that she’s earned a real pet, and her birthday brings her a little brown kitten—which she names “Branch.” The plot trajectory is a familiar one, but Prudence’s travails are described with a straightfaced, declarative simplicity (“Branch doesn’t eat much. Just a little air. Prudence puts out a bowl of water for Branch. So far Branch has not been thirsty”) that turns the story into deliciously absurd comedy. Illustratively, there’s a slight echo of Jules Feiffer and Shel Silverstein in the scrawled lines that constitute the characters and the few additional elements that set the scenes against airy white backgrounds, while soft colors, occasionally touched with pattern or washy edges, digitally fill in the shapes and add emphasis as well as cheer. The short, wide trim size, à la Millions of Cats, provides an excellent frame for sequences to unfold, and the art wittily employs the convention of focusing strongly on the kids, never showing more than a waist-down view of adults. In real life Prudence would probably be viewed as the weird kid with the branch, but in the literary realm she’s an imaginative and determined heroine, and audiences will be glad to see her persistence rewarded.