Doodleday

K-Gr 3—Little Henry loves to draw, so when his dad is working in the home office and Mom has to go to the store, he suggests that he should spend his alone time drawing. Mom shrieks, "Drawing on Doodleday? Are you crazy? Nobody draws on Doodleday and that's that!" She grabs the pencil from his hand and takes off to do her errands. Henry can't resist, so he reaches into his secret stash of colored pencils and commences to draw a fat, hairy fly, which immediately flies off the page and into the kitchen to ransack it for all the tasty treats it has to offer. Henry is appalled by the mess the fly is making and immediately draws a spider, since he knows that spiders eat flies. This spider has other ideas; it would prefer to capture Dad in its web, so Henry draws a bird to eat the spider. And so it goes until the neighborhood is in total shambles and Henry cries out for his mother. She rushes home, grabs the sketch pad, and draws something that will take care of everything. While the book is fabulously illustrated and the action quite engaging, the story seems to have a few lapses in logic. Is there supposed to be a difference between drawing and doodling? Why does Mom's handiwork succeed, but Henry's get out of hand? If Henry "drew" instead of doodled, then why do his drawings and Mom's "doodle" look similar? These are just a few questions that no amount of doodling or drawing could resolve.—Maggie Chase, Boise State University, ID