I have political heartburn over John Cena. Let me start by stating John is a great athlete, actor, and apparently speaks fluent Mandarin. But John works for Disney, and Disney is in tight with the CCP. A few years back, John mentioned on the air, (wrong-speak in China) identifying Taiwan as a country. This apparently was escalated and John groveled on Chinese TV apologizing for the wrong speak.
Taiwan is an ancient ally of the United States, living in the shadow of a great Communist tyrant which has murdered around 100 million people in the 20th century. To knuckle under to a tyrant over $$ at the expense of a bullied ally is unconscionable.
Frankly this is a masterclass on book reviewing BECAUSE this subject is a short book easily understood by even the doofiest of doofuses. Therefore the arguments are strong and the flaws of the novel are completely clear. And if a book review doesn't lead me to a dramatic drink spray at least once, what is even the point?
Although I would say per, “ At best, it demonstrates that if you show up, some freak event might occur in your favor.” 90% of life is just showing up. I’m a firm believer in that adage.
It reminds me of my own childhood epiphany: watching Sesame Street, they had Savion Glover singing a song about how "You can do anything you set your mind to!" while tap dancing. And in that moment I realized -- no matter how hard I might set my mind to it, I would never, ever be able to tap dance like Savion Glover.
The thing is, it wasn't traumatic! It was freeing. Over time, I've come to believe that accepting and acknowledging my natural limits is crucial to my happiness.
If you believe that "you can do anything you set your mind to," then if you fail, it must mean that it's your fault for not setting your mind to it hard enough. This is a recipe for guilt and shame.
It's much better to understand that you have certain strengths that you can leverage for success, certain weaknesses that you can overcome through willpower and hard work, and certain hard limits that you simply will not ever exceed. The "Serenity Prayer" applies to your own self as much as it does to your circumstances.
Same here. I’m a classically trained singer, and there came a point, thankfully early in my training, when I realized that I lacked the physical capacity to be an opera singer. This was a good thing! It meant that now I sing for pleasure (and enjoy the amazed expressions on people’s faces when I hit the high notes) and am not wasting time and money on something that is impossible.
Oh wow, I still remember that episode! You must have been one smart kid though to have an epiphany like that at such a young age. (Unless you were watching Sesame Street at like 12 years old.)
I loved this. With two toddlers I spend a lot of time contemplating the deeper meanings of children's books. A lot of them suffer from a moral that's not really supported by the plot, but I've rarely seen it laid out so clearly.
The ones that are just psychedelic fever dreams are fine by me (Runaway Bunny, anyone?), as are the slice-of-life "What does baby do today?" types. But if you're going to be heavy-handed with a message it better hold up.
OK, fine, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back is clearly about original sin (eating a forbidden food) entering creation (symbolized by digging, unearthing the world from the "blank slate" of the snowstorm). The sin can never be removed directly, it only spreads and is moved around until the whole of creation is tainted by it. It's eventually remedied by the deeply recursive cats representing the layers and layers of subcreations, each individual using their own unique talents to play one small part in the tikkun olam of rebuilding the cracks in the world. You can clearly see the Kabbalistic symbolism of the cats as they're represented by letters of the alphabet.
People love shitting on Goodnight Moon (and hardly anyone’s heard of Runaway Bunny), but those books are rare and special in that they meet toddlers - barely aware of the world around them - right where they are in that magical early childhood dream-life consciousness, and give the parent/reader a few minutes of beautiful, loving sounds to recite and deliver almost directly into the child’s mind.
It’s so beautiful I’m crying just sitting here thinking about it.
Incredible review. I have a 2 year old godson who loves trucks, and have been trying to figure out a good christmas gift. Somehow, improbably, this review talked me into giving Cena another book sale.
The Little Blue Truck series are good and have a solid rhyme scheme (another pet peeve of mine, children's books with tortured meter). I think the original LBT is the best but the follow-ups I've read aren't bad.
I agree about the high quality of Little Blue Truck. And yes, there are a ton of rhyme and meter issues in kids’ books. Like what’s going on here in “Awesome Ambulances”?
Urgh...I don't think I realized before that my dialect, at least, doesn't allow "they've" unless the "have" is modifying another verb. So you can say, "They've got medicine," but "they've medicine" sounds very, very wrong.
Haha DaveOTN I find myself agreeing with you again... Little Blue Truck series reads GREAT as beat poetry. It's clean and rhythmic and allows plenty of drama from the reader.
This was a very good read, but I disagreed with enough of it that I now find myself in the awkward position of wanting to defend a book I don’t like.
From a pure plot standpoint, I should point out, it’s unlikely that Elbow Grease will run out of charge again on his next go at the derby. It’s explicit in the text that he was only low on juice because he drove all night and entered the race illicitly. Presumably next time he’ll start with a full battery.
I didn’t see the the advanced vocabulary of the smart brother, Pinball, as an opportunity for mockery. The smart brother is placed in opposition not only to the dumb brother, but also to the brave brother and the fast brother. We’re not supposed to belittle Flash for being fast! Being smart is, again explicitly, Pinball’s virtue (and he incidentally gets the best line in the book: “I am currently on fire”).
But I’ll admit I skipped over some of Pinball’s verbiage when I read the book to my 2yo, as I did 100,000X before we returned it to the library. Maybe I’d be more bitter about the book if I’d actually bought it.
The bar for truck books is pretty low, and I’ve read so many that are mostly just sound effects (“Vroom! Crunch! Here comes the excavator!”) that I appreciated Cena crafting a story that involves sentences and a plot. The story *is* incoherent, but in part this incoherence is endemic to the “little machine” genre. There’s always a little snowplow or bulldozer, and everyone makes fun blah blah. But of course part of the point of being a small child is that you will, in fact, grow, and in growing become more competent. Machines cannot grow, and I don’t really know how to reconcile this fact with the narratives I keep reading to my kid. What does it mean when we see children, i.e. tiny cars, in the Pixar Cars franchise? Will they shuck off their metal carapace like an arthropod shedding its exoskeleton? I can never tell how much of a curmudgeon I’m being when I complain about these things. I mean, trucks don’t have eyes, either. They can’t even talk!
I think the “message” of this book, insofar as one exists, is expressed in the cliché “You miss every shot you don’t take,” or, as Ashida Kim once wrote, “What will happen in one’s own life is already written, but one must choose to be there. This is the Way of the Ninja.” There was virtue in Elbow Grease’s effort, even if he did not win, and even if he had not been struck by lightning. It doesn’t matter than EG finished the race any more than it matters that he came in last.
Note how when the brothers try to do the things they’re not good at, as the end of the book insists is the best way to live one’s life, that they are in fact really bad at them. As already noted, Pinball literally sets himself on fire. (Having Crash, the daredevil brother, be bad as reading safety regulations is also a solid gag.) I guess the idea that we should try things we’re bad at is not the worst message I’ve gotten from a children’s book.
But I don’t know if the book is very efficient at conveying this message.
This is a fair point, and I considered writing about it.
For me, there wasn’t enough information in the text. Driving to the track wore down his battery, but how do the trucks normally get to the track? Could EG be towed there to conserve his battery? Or would he be permitted to sleep/charge at the track the night before? Plus, my hybrid can go 600 miles at a time—if driving to the race wiped him out, that’s a bad sign.
In the end, I decided getting into these logistics would bog the review down without changing the conclusion. Cena says the other trucks in the race are bigger and faster from the start (as his brothers are every day) so there was nothing to suggest he would have a shot with a full battery, if that is possible.
How we’re meant to see Pinball is a matter of interpretation—I thought it was supposed to be funny, especially because of his nerdy glasses and teeth (they stick out more in other pictures) but maybe not!
Thanks for your comment, it’s cool to hear from someone who has the book.
Yeah, I agree there’s a lot that’s unclear in the book. We’re told EG’s brother “arrive” just as EG is crossing the finish line, which would seem to imply they came looking for him and just found him…but the pictures show the brothers all in the race themselves, and when they “arrive” they’re clearly spattered in mud. Did the artist decide the brothers should be in the race? Was this done behind the back of Cena or the text he prepared?
I do think the concept of effort is inherently incoherent. When I was young, teachers would say, “I don’t mind if you’re just not good at x, but I do mind if you don’t try,” and I would say to them, “What if you’re just not good at trying?” which was not a popular response. At the time I assumed that teachers valued “effort” because you can’t make someone better at math by screaming at them, but you can make someone try harder by screaming at them, and of course teachers would choose a goal that lets them maximize their screaming, or less cynically, lets them appear to be capable of making a difference. I no longer believe teachers value screaming so much, and I see the “effort” narrative is larger than the fictions valued by educators…but I still don’t have an answer to the question What if you’re just not good at trying?
Honestly, I don’t know I would write a book about gumption. But I don’t know how I would write a book about anthropomorphic trucks either. If John Cena didn’t do a good job, should I paradoxically praise him for trying something he’s not good at?
My 2yo heard my wife and me talking about your review and then he asked us to read Elbow Grease to him, and I had to tell him that we returned it to the library, and that did not go over well. There’s some trouble over here this morning…
Oh that’s interesting—I assumed that after finishing earlier, the brothers and Mel went back to the finish line to see EG finish. But you’re right, the language is weird. The brothers are definitely racing in the pictures.
Having small children myself, I think it's in their nature to assume a "little machine" is a child like them, with no care for the inconvenient reality of how machines actually work. So to me, pretending a little machine can grow up to be a big machine is no worse than pretending magic works in fairy tales - no harm done, they'll grow out of believing this as they get older.
Underrated comment...
LOVED this! Thank you Freddie—and thank you Carina; I've always appreciated your prolific commenting here :)
This is a very fun review, with a good tie-in to some the themes that show up on this blog and in FDB's book. Congrats Carina.
This may be the best book review of all time.
Great review on a so-so book.
I have political heartburn over John Cena. Let me start by stating John is a great athlete, actor, and apparently speaks fluent Mandarin. But John works for Disney, and Disney is in tight with the CCP. A few years back, John mentioned on the air, (wrong-speak in China) identifying Taiwan as a country. This apparently was escalated and John groveled on Chinese TV apologizing for the wrong speak.
Taiwan is an ancient ally of the United States, living in the shadow of a great Communist tyrant which has murdered around 100 million people in the 20th century. To knuckle under to a tyrant over $$ at the expense of a bullied ally is unconscionable.
“confident that my own son would fare better than the reviewer’s simple grandchild” -- this line sent me
Frankly this is a masterclass on book reviewing BECAUSE this subject is a short book easily understood by even the doofiest of doofuses. Therefore the arguments are strong and the flaws of the novel are completely clear. And if a book review doesn't lead me to a dramatic drink spray at least once, what is even the point?
That was brilliantly written!
Although I would say per, “ At best, it demonstrates that if you show up, some freak event might occur in your favor.” 90% of life is just showing up. I’m a firm believer in that adage.
It reminds me of my own childhood epiphany: watching Sesame Street, they had Savion Glover singing a song about how "You can do anything you set your mind to!" while tap dancing. And in that moment I realized -- no matter how hard I might set my mind to it, I would never, ever be able to tap dance like Savion Glover.
Thank you for sharing this traumatic childhood moment.
The thing is, it wasn't traumatic! It was freeing. Over time, I've come to believe that accepting and acknowledging my natural limits is crucial to my happiness.
If you believe that "you can do anything you set your mind to," then if you fail, it must mean that it's your fault for not setting your mind to it hard enough. This is a recipe for guilt and shame.
It's much better to understand that you have certain strengths that you can leverage for success, certain weaknesses that you can overcome through willpower and hard work, and certain hard limits that you simply will not ever exceed. The "Serenity Prayer" applies to your own self as much as it does to your circumstances.
I was partially teasing; I agree with this completely!
Same here. I’m a classically trained singer, and there came a point, thankfully early in my training, when I realized that I lacked the physical capacity to be an opera singer. This was a good thing! It meant that now I sing for pleasure (and enjoy the amazed expressions on people’s faces when I hit the high notes) and am not wasting time and money on something that is impossible.
Oh wow, I still remember that episode! You must have been one smart kid though to have an epiphany like that at such a young age. (Unless you were watching Sesame Street at like 12 years old.)
Bert and Ernie are a hoot at any age.
I loved this. With two toddlers I spend a lot of time contemplating the deeper meanings of children's books. A lot of them suffer from a moral that's not really supported by the plot, but I've rarely seen it laid out so clearly.
The ones that are just psychedelic fever dreams are fine by me (Runaway Bunny, anyone?), as are the slice-of-life "What does baby do today?" types. But if you're going to be heavy-handed with a message it better hold up.
OK, fine, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back is clearly about original sin (eating a forbidden food) entering creation (symbolized by digging, unearthing the world from the "blank slate" of the snowstorm). The sin can never be removed directly, it only spreads and is moved around until the whole of creation is tainted by it. It's eventually remedied by the deeply recursive cats representing the layers and layers of subcreations, each individual using their own unique talents to play one small part in the tikkun olam of rebuilding the cracks in the world. You can clearly see the Kabbalistic symbolism of the cats as they're represented by letters of the alphabet.
People love shitting on Goodnight Moon (and hardly anyone’s heard of Runaway Bunny), but those books are rare and special in that they meet toddlers - barely aware of the world around them - right where they are in that magical early childhood dream-life consciousness, and give the parent/reader a few minutes of beautiful, loving sounds to recite and deliver almost directly into the child’s mind.
It’s so beautiful I’m crying just sitting here thinking about it.
Success is all luck and lightning. Sounds like too much Critical Truck Theory too early.
Incredible review. I have a 2 year old godson who loves trucks, and have been trying to figure out a good christmas gift. Somehow, improbably, this review talked me into giving Cena another book sale.
The Little Blue Truck series are good and have a solid rhyme scheme (another pet peeve of mine, children's books with tortured meter). I think the original LBT is the best but the follow-ups I've read aren't bad.
I agree about the high quality of Little Blue Truck. And yes, there are a ton of rhyme and meter issues in kids’ books. Like what’s going on here in “Awesome Ambulances”?
They store all kinds of bandages,
in case you start to bleed.
To deal with pain and problems,
They’ve medicine you might need.
My husband gets extremely irked by bad meter/rhyming in children's books. I, meanwhile, only get rather irked.
Urgh...I don't think I realized before that my dialect, at least, doesn't allow "they've" unless the "have" is modifying another verb. So you can say, "They've got medicine," but "they've medicine" sounds very, very wrong.
To me, it rings perfectly grammatical, just very old-fashioned. Not something anyone I know would actually say these days.
Haha DaveOTN I find myself agreeing with you again... Little Blue Truck series reads GREAT as beat poetry. It's clean and rhythmic and allows plenty of drama from the reader.
Check out Flip Flap Fly if you get a chance. Warning: you may find yourself slipping into its rhyme scheme for the rest of your life.
Great book review! I didn't think a review of a kid book could be so entertaining.
Great review.
Thank you for this wonderful review, and thanks to Freddie for picking such a deserving winner.
This was a very good read, but I disagreed with enough of it that I now find myself in the awkward position of wanting to defend a book I don’t like.
From a pure plot standpoint, I should point out, it’s unlikely that Elbow Grease will run out of charge again on his next go at the derby. It’s explicit in the text that he was only low on juice because he drove all night and entered the race illicitly. Presumably next time he’ll start with a full battery.
I didn’t see the the advanced vocabulary of the smart brother, Pinball, as an opportunity for mockery. The smart brother is placed in opposition not only to the dumb brother, but also to the brave brother and the fast brother. We’re not supposed to belittle Flash for being fast! Being smart is, again explicitly, Pinball’s virtue (and he incidentally gets the best line in the book: “I am currently on fire”).
But I’ll admit I skipped over some of Pinball’s verbiage when I read the book to my 2yo, as I did 100,000X before we returned it to the library. Maybe I’d be more bitter about the book if I’d actually bought it.
The bar for truck books is pretty low, and I’ve read so many that are mostly just sound effects (“Vroom! Crunch! Here comes the excavator!”) that I appreciated Cena crafting a story that involves sentences and a plot. The story *is* incoherent, but in part this incoherence is endemic to the “little machine” genre. There’s always a little snowplow or bulldozer, and everyone makes fun blah blah. But of course part of the point of being a small child is that you will, in fact, grow, and in growing become more competent. Machines cannot grow, and I don’t really know how to reconcile this fact with the narratives I keep reading to my kid. What does it mean when we see children, i.e. tiny cars, in the Pixar Cars franchise? Will they shuck off their metal carapace like an arthropod shedding its exoskeleton? I can never tell how much of a curmudgeon I’m being when I complain about these things. I mean, trucks don’t have eyes, either. They can’t even talk!
I think the “message” of this book, insofar as one exists, is expressed in the cliché “You miss every shot you don’t take,” or, as Ashida Kim once wrote, “What will happen in one’s own life is already written, but one must choose to be there. This is the Way of the Ninja.” There was virtue in Elbow Grease’s effort, even if he did not win, and even if he had not been struck by lightning. It doesn’t matter than EG finished the race any more than it matters that he came in last.
Note how when the brothers try to do the things they’re not good at, as the end of the book insists is the best way to live one’s life, that they are in fact really bad at them. As already noted, Pinball literally sets himself on fire. (Having Crash, the daredevil brother, be bad as reading safety regulations is also a solid gag.) I guess the idea that we should try things we’re bad at is not the worst message I’ve gotten from a children’s book.
But I don’t know if the book is very efficient at conveying this message.
This is a fair point, and I considered writing about it.
For me, there wasn’t enough information in the text. Driving to the track wore down his battery, but how do the trucks normally get to the track? Could EG be towed there to conserve his battery? Or would he be permitted to sleep/charge at the track the night before? Plus, my hybrid can go 600 miles at a time—if driving to the race wiped him out, that’s a bad sign.
In the end, I decided getting into these logistics would bog the review down without changing the conclusion. Cena says the other trucks in the race are bigger and faster from the start (as his brothers are every day) so there was nothing to suggest he would have a shot with a full battery, if that is possible.
How we’re meant to see Pinball is a matter of interpretation—I thought it was supposed to be funny, especially because of his nerdy glasses and teeth (they stick out more in other pictures) but maybe not!
Thanks for your comment, it’s cool to hear from someone who has the book.
Yeah, I agree there’s a lot that’s unclear in the book. We’re told EG’s brother “arrive” just as EG is crossing the finish line, which would seem to imply they came looking for him and just found him…but the pictures show the brothers all in the race themselves, and when they “arrive” they’re clearly spattered in mud. Did the artist decide the brothers should be in the race? Was this done behind the back of Cena or the text he prepared?
I do think the concept of effort is inherently incoherent. When I was young, teachers would say, “I don’t mind if you’re just not good at x, but I do mind if you don’t try,” and I would say to them, “What if you’re just not good at trying?” which was not a popular response. At the time I assumed that teachers valued “effort” because you can’t make someone better at math by screaming at them, but you can make someone try harder by screaming at them, and of course teachers would choose a goal that lets them maximize their screaming, or less cynically, lets them appear to be capable of making a difference. I no longer believe teachers value screaming so much, and I see the “effort” narrative is larger than the fictions valued by educators…but I still don’t have an answer to the question What if you’re just not good at trying?
Honestly, I don’t know I would write a book about gumption. But I don’t know how I would write a book about anthropomorphic trucks either. If John Cena didn’t do a good job, should I paradoxically praise him for trying something he’s not good at?
My 2yo heard my wife and me talking about your review and then he asked us to read Elbow Grease to him, and I had to tell him that we returned it to the library, and that did not go over well. There’s some trouble over here this morning…
Oh that’s interesting—I assumed that after finishing earlier, the brothers and Mel went back to the finish line to see EG finish. But you’re right, the language is weird. The brothers are definitely racing in the pictures.
Oh no, poor 2yo… kids really do love this book. 😭
Having small children myself, I think it's in their nature to assume a "little machine" is a child like them, with no care for the inconvenient reality of how machines actually work. So to me, pretending a little machine can grow up to be a big machine is no worse than pretending magic works in fairy tales - no harm done, they'll grow out of believing this as they get older.