A few weeks ago I reviewed another book by the De Villiers family. That one featured Seedling, a small plant character. I didn't care for the book. This book, The Long Shortcut, stars Sprout, who may be Seedling's older brother. I'm sorry to say I don't care for this one much either.

There are some things I liked about this book. It's not written in poor rhyme. That's a big plus. It's full of bold and sometimes clashing colors, which make it interesting to look at. A positive aspect of the story is the lesson the author is attempting to teach--obey the rules. That's not a bad thing for children to learn.

But for every good point, it seems there is a corresponding bad point. The story is not written in rhyme but neither is it written particularly well. There are no funny lines and nothing in the prose that jumps out as fresh. There are a couple of clichés and in a text this short that shouldn't happen.

A second problem is with the pictures. Yes, there are bold colors, but the characters are unattractive with their scary, misshapen eyes. And the eyes are confusing because they constantly change size. On one page Sprout's left eye is the big eye and on the next it's his right. This seems to be a physical attribute belonging to this species because it happens to them all (even the lenses of the teacher's glasses change shape to fit the changing eyes) and while the creator has the right to make his plant people with distorted and morphing eyes and spectacles, it bothers me because it feels sloppy. The characters don't really look like plants, either, even though they have plant names. They look like alien insects.

Finally, I have some problems with the lesson, which is worth teaching, because I'm not sure whether this book actually taught it. Nothing very painful happens to either boy. Twig, the boy who disobeys and strays from the path, is scared and lost for a little while and Sprout, the boy who doesn't tell the truth, is a little worried about his friend. Both boys say they are sorry and the teacher offers to race them back to the school where they can all eat lunch and have dessert. So the lesson ends up being, "If you don't obey you might be scared and worried for a while but in a bit you'll be running and playing and eating good food." It didn't feel like it had much bite to it. Oh, for the days of Mother Goose where little old women gave their children broth without any bread and then whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed. That for children who had committed no crime--there were simply so many of them that their mother didn't know what to do. So she abused them. Now there's a lesson we don't find in too many children's books today--make yourselves scarce ye ill-bred brats.

Well, OK, maybe we need not whip good little children but I sure would like to see bad children occasionally get their due. Let's see a few long noses or donkey ears before we let the tykes off, I say. Foxes eat snotty, disobedient gingerbread men. It's a tough world. Little Twig, who disobeyed, could have been a spicy herb twig and he might have met a troll and been boiled up in a pot of goat stew. That's what Mother Goose would have done, I think. And all the other little vegetable children would have stayed on the proper path after that, you may be sure.

I'm mostly kidding around, but the truth is that children see pretty clearly. And I think they will easily see that nothing really happens to the boy who strays off the path. There's no climax to this book.

Another thing about small children is that they like to anticipate the next move and they heartily enjoy repetition, but they also love to be surprised. The best books, I think, allow the readers to stay one step ahead of the character while the story still offers delightful little surprises along the way and a big twisty surprise at the end. The Long Shortcut leaned more toward the predictable and less toward the surprising.

In the end, though, it's way better than any picture book I've ever written so I give it two and a half stars.

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Copyright © 2005 Sally Apokedak