KIDS' BOOKS
Making Grizzle Grow
by Rachna Gilmore; Leslie Elizabeth Watts, illus.
Age group: 4-7
Price: $19.95 cloth
ISBN: 978-1-55041-885-9
Page count: 32 pp.
Size: 8-1/4 x 10-3/4
Released: Oct.
Rachna Gilmore’s picture books tend toward sweet endings, but those involving family conflict, such as the GG winner A Screaming Kind of Day and the early My Mother Is Weird, also carry a satisfying bite.
So it is with Making Grizzle Grow, in which Emily, annoyed with her father for breaking his promise to play outside with her, finds an imaginative way to bare her teeth at him. Playing alone in the snow, she creates Grizzle, a dinosaur with a gaping mouth and insatiable appetite. Emily feeds Grizzle pizza and roasted meat until he’s enormous, and still her father fails to look up from his work. When Dad finally does wander outside, it’s straight into the path of the monster. Emily leaps to her dad’s rescue, but not before considering what easy prey he would be.
This story makes a reassuring suggestion to its small readers: it’s okay to get angry, and it might be smart to express it indirectly. Emily loves her Dad, but she’s not always sweet on him (at one point, for instance, she speculates that he’s picking his nose). For the most part, the visual elements of the book suit this defiant humour, although the stark white and blue cover illustration is not the best advertisement for the vibrant pictures inside. Leslie Watts’s illustrations are pleasing in the way they flesh out the text’s sketchier details, such as the father’s all-consuming work. Like Emily, he is making a sculpture, but his turns out to be a small cat, a mere bauble compared with Grizzle.
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