The senseless, impossible, reality bending view of the world, is the purpose of the latest picturebook by the celebrated author-illustrator Eric Carle. At first glance, the theme is made evident to readers; the front dust jacket cover illustrates a yellow duck popping out of a peeled banana. The text on the cover reads “THE NONSENSE SHOW”, and is written in a colorful block font, using all capital letters. The dedication page features Rene Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images, which leads the reader to anticipate a heavy surrealistic theme, in the illustrations. Eric Carle puts the reader into a circus of inverses, using creative humor, to give the reader a charmed experience inspired by familiar scenarios and idioms. The book
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The illustrations provide the reader with the surrealists, creative imagery, forging a whimsically delightful picturebook. The text format is simple rhyming words, which offers congruence between the theme and illustration format. The way Carle uses human and animal relationships as a parallel concept of nonsense is creative genius. One scene features a kangaroo with a boy hanging out of the pouch, another shows a man looking in the mirror, but the reflection he sees is a gorilla. The complement text reads, “Who’s that I see? It can’t be me. I’ll tell you who I look like: You!” The reader would not know what Carle was referencing, if the illustration of a man, mirror, and gorilla were not included. The illustrations in the book span across two pages, for a total of eighteen, surrealistic, wacky scenes. The book features format specific to the picturebooks, for example colored end pages, and fantastic artistic illustrations. In this book, Carle adds something different from his previous books. A man in the back seat of a cab is reading the newspaper, the text is reversed and can be read using a mirror. He combines a newspaper clipping with the painted tissue paper, in this scene about gas prices. The book concludes with an illustration featuring the boy and the rabbit magician, above them a word bubble containing synonyms of the word nonsense, which perfectly describe the
The illustrations provide the reader with the surrealists, creative imagery, forging a whimsically delightful picturebook. The text format is simple rhyming words, which offers congruence between the theme and illustration format. The way Carle uses human and animal relationships as a parallel concept of nonsense is creative genius. One scene features a kangaroo with a boy hanging out of the pouch, another shows a man looking in the mirror, but the reflection he sees is a gorilla. The complement text reads, “Who’s that I see? It can’t be me. I’ll tell you who I look like: You!” The reader would not know what Carle was referencing, if the illustration of a man, mirror, and gorilla were not included. The illustrations in the book span across two pages, for a total of eighteen, surrealistic, wacky scenes. The book features format specific to the picturebooks, for example colored end pages, and fantastic artistic illustrations. In this book, Carle adds something different from his previous books. A man in the back seat of a cab is reading the newspaper, the text is reversed and can be read using a mirror. He combines a newspaper clipping with the painted tissue paper, in this scene about gas prices. The book concludes with an illustration featuring the boy and the rabbit magician, above them a word bubble containing synonyms of the word nonsense, which perfectly describe the