I said I would write more about Paul McCartney's High in the Clouds once I'd actually read it for myself.
So .... I've read it. Some of it anyway. And ... well, let's just say Elesh, my eight-year-old, likes it. I read about 15 pages and lost interest, but he got to page 26 and then asked for a bookmark. He intends to continue at a later date. Once he's finished playing his Star Wars: Jedi Academy PC game!
I think a big part of the reason why I don't like the book has nothing to do with the way it's written. I just happen not to like wordy picture books. Don't know why but I encounter a sort of mind block when I open a picture book and there's whole, huge paragraphs in front of me. I'm more likely to stick with that much text if it's a novel (chapter book). It's quite dumb, I know. There are probably lots of great stories I'm missing out on because of this inexplicable prejudice of mine.
OK, what I really did not take to about this book is the illustrations. To like a picture book, To even give it the time of day, I have to like the illustrations. Sometimes the writing's so-so, but the pictures are good and tell their own little story. Sometimes the pictures are awful but the words grab you and pull you in.
The pictures in High in the Clouds just didn't do anything for me. I think they lack soul and character. And I really don't like the way the hero, Wirral (the squirrel) , is drawn. There's nothing attarctive about him. I like my squirrels looking like Nutkin (from The Tale of Squirrel nutkin by Beatrix Potter) whose tail oozes more personality than Wirral's whole weedy body.
Chief Bison is rather nice though. He's a big block of a bison. Like a furry chunk of something. Very solid and dependable.
Back to the writing. I guess Philip Ardagh wrote this book with McCartney? I don't detect his style (which, admittedly, I know only from the Eddie Dickens books - I quite like them) at all, but then I don't detect any style really. Tell you what the writing here reminds me of - those "novelisations" of animated movies. (The most recent batch of truly terrible books are based on Disney's Chicken Little.) It's just about telling a story with as little imagination and feeling as possible - so it seems to me anyway. When I read books like these it's like overhearing a conversation that is so boring it turns into meaningless sounds - blah, blah, blah, jabber, yabber, yabber, jabber.
Anyway. I guess I don't like High in the Clouds. Elesh does though and I guess that's what really matters.
Nutkin: Now this is what I call a squirrel!
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