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Don’t Dig So Deep, Nicholas!

by Troon Harrison, Gary Clement, illus.

What to say, what to say. Don’t Dig So Deep, Nicholas! is awfully good in that it’s both awful in places and very good in others. Pointing out the bad side sounds churlish, but praise alone does an injustice to every child whose attention is usurped for even the short time it takes to read a picture book. Nicholas is still worth buying because it is bright and interesting. But it could have been better.

The plot line is a common one: child releases amazing creatures, they create pandemonium, then things return to normal. Nicholas is warned not to keep digging in the sand or he’ll go right through to Australia. He persists, and out from his hole on the beach leap red kangaroos “with feet like rocking-chair rockers,” shag-rug camels, and round, furry wombats. The imaginative writer and storyteller Troon Harrison floods us with an overwhelming number of words for the level of tale. They’re all delicious words, but at heart they’re little more than a list.

Gary Clement can certainly draw well. Toying with another style besides the one in his GG-nominated book, Just Stay Put, he precariously straddles the line between weird (which kids love), and just plain ugly (which looks to kids like the worst drawer in the class on a bad day). Among his pages packed with delightfully wonky characters and very well-designed scenes, why does he have Nicholas sporting tiny, bright red kewpie-doll lips, which look yucky? Why does he make the wombat faces look stupid and menacing and just drawn wrong? Why are the colours so low-contrast – beige koalas, beige sand – that viewers deke out the side door with their attention? And a complaint from the kids I read this to: a beach is a place full of people sunbathing and swimming – why is this beach so empty?

And – at the same time – kids will love the lotsa words and the howling dingoes. Their curiosity about kookaburras and cockatoos is awakened by the silliness of the story. It’s a book well worth having, but I just can’t help but wish it went further and was better. Excellent talents. They stopped the reworking too soon.

 

Reviewer: Loris Lesynski

Publisher: Owl Books

DETAILS

Price: $17.95

Page Count: 32 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-895688-51-5

Released: Feb.

Issue Date: 1997-2

Categories: Picture Books

Age Range: ages 4+ 81³2 x 101³4