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A Favorite Book

 People think of Tomi Ungerer as the Michelangelo of picture books; the images are strange, and they make your eyes pop, and no one else could invent them.


Also, Ungerer's narrative ideas are sublime and weird; they are not earthbound. In a matter-of-fact way, Ungerer announces that a bat has stumbled in on a late-night drive-in movie. ("I have to see color! I have to see the daytime world!") Other writers could work for decades, and they'd never have anything like that idea.

A final thing I love about Ungerer is that he doesn't moralize, and he doesn't underline in an unnecessary way. He doesn't talk down to kids. Determined to make his own path, a bat begins to experiment with paint, and he sketches green and purple designs on his little body. We don't need an aside about the wonder of being different. We don't need the narrator to observe that a slightly goofy moment is slightly goofy. The story just unfolds; less is more.

This might seem easy, but then you pick up a picture book that Ungerer *didn't* write -- and you start to sense the dimensions of Ungerer's gift.














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