Jangles: A Big Fish Story (review)

A child narrator relays with pride and awe the story his father often tells of an encounter with Jangles, a fish "so big he ate eagles from the trees that hung over the lake and full-grown beavers that strayed too far from home." Dad's story gets bigger with each fresh claim, escalating from details of whole turkeys used as bait to dynamite explosions that failed to get much of a rise from Jangles. Dad boasts that he was the one to finally bring the fish to heel (to fin?), hooking him, getting pulled down to his underwater home, listening to Jangles' stories, and finally flipping him and preparing for the kill. Jangles talked him out of it, though, and Dad ended up doing the right thing by letting him go. To prove his story, Dad now offers his offspring a tackle box, filled with lures that once dangled from Jangles' mouth, as indisputable evidence. Dad may have pulled one over on his kid, but readers are far too savvy to fall for this flimflam, which is the whole fun of a tall tale anyhow. Unfortunately, the story itself is whisper thin, and the gentle moralizing is somewhat out of place in so rollicking a genre. The densely atmospheric paintings, though, add a touch of intriguing eeriness to a tale that plays out on moonlit lakes and in shadowy depths, and the dynamic compositions are ultimately as memorable as the hyperbole.