The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon

The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon

By Mini Grey

I have to admit that I’ve never had the change to read Mini Grey before. Somehow I managed to miss her numerous books. But after reading The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon, I’ll be looking for more of her creative titles.

The book follows Dish and Spoon after their very famous running away. They start a career doing vaudeville and become incredibly popular. The money rolls in and the duo become used to the finer things in life. When the money runs out they turn to knife gangsters to borrow more. The gang soon want their money back and intimidate the pair. The couple turn to a life of crime to pay back the debt and end up on the lam. In their hurry to escape from the cops, Dish becomes broken and the Spoon allows himself to be captured when he finds that she can’t go on. He serves his time and is finally released. He gives himself to a crockery and silverware shop, only to run into the recovered Dish. They run away (again!) and live happily ever after.

I love reinventions of classic stories, and this one has to be one of the more inventive ones that I’ve seen. Grey tells a subversive tale, that takes a sweet and silly nursery rhyme and makes it into a darker tale about greed and crime. Grey does it very tongue in cheek, never taking the story too seriously. “Someone put a record on the new record player. It was playing our tune. How could we resist?” The words swoop out the window along with the dish and the spoon, as you see two cat paws putting Hey Diddle Diddle on the record player. In fact the cat, the fiddle, the cow, and the moon appear throughout the book, even showing up in the crockery shop at the end or the lost cow sign posted after Spoon gets out of prison. In fact not only does the whole story play around with the nursery rhyme, but Grey spends most of the book playing around with us. There are little jokes throughout the book.

Grey uses a mixture of collage and paint to create frenetic images. With the mad caper going on, these illustrations are simply perfect. There are tons of things to look at, to read, and to savor. I found myself going back through the book over and over to try to catch all the little visual jokes. And each time I saw something new. The running away image is the perfect example. The scene includes collage cows jumping over a painted silver dollar moon. The dish in the spoon float in a painted sea. On either side, there are panels that show the pair’s dive into the ocean and their arrival in New York. Most of the book is told in two or three panel spreads, showing how frantic and wild this story really is. Things feel crowded and rushed but at the same time wonderfully silly. You want to linger on these illustrations but the story forces you to move faster. I’ve reread this little book at least six times since I first picked it up. And I’m sure I’ll read it again and again. A wonderfully subversive tale, filled with humor and fantastic illustrations. I must find more of Mini Grey’s work.

Tatty Ratty

The problem with having two blogs is that one of them is always falling behind. I'm sad to say that it has been this one. But my hope is to change that today. I'm going to plan to spend this wonderfully rainy weekend working up some reviews ahead of time. I figure if I have a bit of a cushion, I'll be more likely to post frequently. I'm going to start with a couple of the books that Jeff brought home for me during my ankle recovery.

In Tatty Ratty by Helen Cooper, the story follows a young girl who leaves her beloved stuffed rabbit on the bus. After initially being crushed by the loss her parents encourage her to imagine all the adventures that her bunny can get into by himself. First he hops off the bus, then finds a train to drive home. After having breakfast with the three bears and riding with Cinderella in her pumpkin coach, he sails off into the sunset with pirates (during her bath-time of course). But a dragon picks him up from the pirate ship and sails him up to the moon. There he is cleaned up and his fur which has been cleaned and renewed, is dusted with moon dust until it glows white. After his cleaning and primping, a spaceship takes the new looking bunny and delivers him home. Well, not quite home, but close enough that the little girl can find him at the local store.

I loved how this book took a very typical situation, a lost toy, and created a number of little stories based around it. The mixing in of familiar nursery rhyme characters is wonderful since they are figures that children have been exposed to all their lives. They will get a kick out of recognizing the stories. This is a great story to tell any child dealing with a missing favorite toy and may get them using their imagination to think about what their toy is doing. The story mixes the routine of the household along with the adventures of the bunny, so that we see what the girl is doing to inspire each story change. Each story is really there to show how the bunny gets cleaned up for the ending. When driving the train he gets his buttons back. During breakfast with the three bears he gains enough weight to fill out. The encounter with the pirates includes a dunking in the sea which washes his fur. And then of course the scene with the man in the moon makes that fur again. The subtle foreshadowing leads to the wonderful ending in the store. I loved the ending where the little girl feels that she's found her bunny all cleaned up and fresh at the store the next day. A sweet story that reminds me of the stories I told about my toys when growing up.

The artwork is beautiful, soft, and colorful. The sections will Molly are realistic and although they are colorful, are scenes that we've seen every day. But once the story switches to Tatty Ratty's adventures the rules of perspective and realism are tossed away. The images become more colorful and cartoonish. The scene where Tatty Ratty returns to earth from the spaceship, using a big red umbrella is one of the more beautiful images I've seen in a while. You can see a bit of it on the cover above. It was wonderful to watch the bunny go from his ratty self at the beginning to the cleaned and soft looking bunny at the end. I'm not sure what media Cooper uses but the colors and the soft edges makes the artwork even sweeter. A wonderful book for a child who's lost a toy, or anyone who likes a little imagination along with their toys.