Pete the Cat: Big Easter
Adventure. By Kimberly and James Dean. Harper. $9.99.
Pinkalicious: Eggstraordinary
Easter. By Victoria Kann. HarperFestival. $4.99.
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Alvin’s
Easter Break. By Jodi Huelin. Illustrations by Walter Carzon and Artful
Doodlers. HarperFestival. $3.99.
The Berenstain Bears’ Easter
Parade. By Mike Berenstain. HarperFestival. $3.99.
Kids ages 4-8 who are fans
of specific characters can enjoy them not only in “anytime” books but also in
seasonal works of all sorts – including, this spring, ones in which they help
or are helped by the Easter Bunny. Pete the Cat’s adventure starts when he
finds a note asking him to help by finding, painting and hiding eggs – and the
note comes with a pair of bunny ears to wear while doing all that. The
illustration of Pete hopping like a bunny while wearing the big white ears is
very funny indeed – as is the later one in which he looks even more like a
rabbit after making himself a bunny nose and tail from cotton balls. The
ridiculousness of Pete’s appearance helps make the straightforward story more
fun: Pete predictably gets eggs from the chickens and paint and brushes from
the toolshed, then colors the eggs and takes them around the neighborhood for
his friends to find – earning a thank-you from the Easter Bunny, who shows up
just as Pete is finished helping. The book’s activities are as enjoyable as the
story itself: a full-color poster is included, along with a dozen Easter cards
to be cut out and sent (including several showing Pete with those bunny ears),
plus a page of stickers. Kids who enjoy Kimberly and James Dean’s books about
Pete will find that this one fits into the series very nicely.
Victoria Kann’s series of Pinkalicious
tales gets an amusing, “Pinktastic”-stickers-included Easter entry as well in Pinkalicious: Eggstraordinary Easter.
Here Pinkalicious gets clues from Edgar the Easter Bunny rather than being
asked to help. She and Edgar are pals, so on Easter, he leaves her a special
basket with a note that starts Pinkalicious and her family on a scavenger hunt
– which takes them to a treehouse, school and playground before Pinkalicious is
stumped by a clue saying to go to “the place Pinkalicious loves most.” Eventually
Pinkalicious figures out what the clue means, and all ends happily as she
receives “the most eggstravagant Easter basket,” even though she is too
“eggshausted” to eat the treats immediately. Kann’s usual pleasant inclusion of
Pinkalicious’ brother and parents in the adventure, during which her mom digs
in a sandbox and her dad goes on a playground swing, keeps the family focus of
the book front-and-center and makes it as much a togetherness tale as an Easter
story.
Two other character-driven seasonal
books are not quite at this level and get (+++) ratings, but will still be
enjoyable for fans of their particular fantasy worlds. Alvin’s Easter Break features the singing chipmunks – Simon,
Theodore and Alvin – taking a beach vacation with their human father, Dave, but
being repeatedly interrupted by three identical boys who are big
singing-chipmunk fans and simply won’t leave the trio alone. The “international
rock stars” try to escape the boys “and have some real fun,” but it turns out
that everyone is on the same plane, and everyone is going to the same hotel,
and the “miniature groupies” are tremendously intrusive and at times genuinely
disruptive. But instead of supporting the chipmunks’ desire for a little quiet
time, instead of perhaps saying something to the triplets’ parents, Dave tells
the chipmunks to spend even more time with their fans “in the spirit of holiday
fun.” Under orders, that is just what Simon, Theodore and Alvin do – and in the
spirit of complete fantasy, they discover that their vacation is better as a
result, in fact becoming “the best Easter Alvin could remember.” How parents
interpret this story of celebrity, fandom and privacy will have a great deal to
do with what young readers get out of it.
Some interpretation will
also be helpful for The Berenstain Bears’
Easter Parade, a typically lightly plotted springtime tale in which
everybody decides to get dressed up in finery for a walk through town at Easter
– except for Brother, who is “happy wearing his plain red shirt and blue pants
every day” because when he does, “I always look like me.” That plainspoken
common sense is a problem here, since
everyone else agrees to dress as fancily as possible – which would be just
fine, except that it turns out the family only has old fancy clothing that does not fit properly or is falling apart.
Instead of making do with what they have or repairing the old clothes, the Bear
family proceeds to go to a department store and buy everything new, simply for
the purpose of wearing the dress-up duds one single time and showing themselves
off to the town. And this being a Berenstain Bears book, the result is not that they learn a lesson about
conspicuous consumption and the waste of money on frippery – oh no! Instead,
they receive “the prize for best-dressed family,” and even Brother is converted
to the buy-stuff-and-look-good philosophy. Although Mike Berenstain carries on
the tradition of Stan and Jan Berenstain in making the Bear family pleasant and
its concerns and worries modest, his book has a strangely unsettling subtext in
its disdain for simplicity and advocacy of spending substantial sums of money
to keep up with the Joneses (or the other bears) and to show off. Easy tweaks
to the story would have sent a very different message: for example, Brother
might have bought his new clothes but then given them away to someone who was
needy, ending up feeling good about himself – and perhaps winning a special
award, not for his clothing but for his heart. This is not the Berenstain way,
though, and families will have to decide for themselves how comfortable they
are with the lessons that The Berenstain
Bears’ Easter Parade teaches.
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