>>REVIEW
MOTHER GOOSE EGGS, SUNNY SIDE UP
Jim Westergard
The Porcupine’s Quill, 64 pp.
Jim Westergard’s whimsical woodcuts are the highlight of this odd little book, which revisits the popular children’s rhymes of Mother Goose. Westergard has compiled and illustrated these rhymes in their original, unexpurgated glory, and provided brief commentary pointing out the questionable lessons underlying them.
Taking as his inspiration the premise that each rhyme was based on a real person, Westergard sketches these characters as they may have appeared at the time the verses were written. He also includes detailed woodcuts imagining what the characters may have looked like in their retirement. Since most Mother Goose rhymes are alarmingly violent, Westergard’s woodcut subjects are a haggard, wild-eyed bunch.
Mother Goose Eggs was clearly conceived with patience and attention – and no small measure of glee. According to Westergard, "Ms. Baby" of "Hush-a-by-Baby" has grown up more than a little traumatized from her early experience with vertigo – in retirement she is depicted as a pair of gaping, horror-filled eyes. "Mrs. Shoe," the woman who had so many children she didn’t know what to do, has matured into a hapless victim of weak character and unacceptable living conditions: "Take one parent, incapable of handling stress… top it off with a cramped living space, and you have a recipe for child abuse."
The dust jacket recommends this book to fans of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, and Westergard certainly appears to be shooting for that gruesome-cute flavour of gallows humour. As novelty comedy books go, however, Mother Goose Eggs provokes more eye-rolls than guffaws, and the book never lives up to the standards set by other writers and illustrators of children’s-books-for-adults, such as Gorey or Claudia Hart (creator of the brilliant A Child’s Machiavelli.)
Mother Goose Eggs’s comic failings can be blamed on the quality of the nursery rhymes rather than any obvious fault on Westergard’s part. Mother Goose – whose verses normally revolve around beatings and murders – is so amusingly macabre on her own that funny commentary just seems distracting. Perhaps it would have been a better decision to let the union of Mother Goose’s rhymes and Jim Westergard’s woodcuts speak for itself.
Still, with its careful artwork and jovial tone, this book is undeniably charming. It is an artistic, good-spirited book – unquestionably sunny side up. |
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