LION’S TALE IS PERFECTLY PACED
Born in Montreal, raised in upstate New York and now living in Brooklyn, Lucy Ruth Cummins has made a name for herself as art director of children’s books, helping shepherd into publication such titles as the Governor General- prize- winning Cats’ Night Out, by Caroline Stutson, and the more recent Kenneth Oppel novel The Nest, both illustrated by Jon Klassen.
But in the case of A Hungry Lion, Cummins has relinquished the reins of art director, instead taking up the combined roles of author and illustrator. The result, not surprisingly, is a picture book that is perfectly paced and, at least to this reader, laugh- out- loud funny.
Cummins, described in a 2014 Publishers Weekly article as an inveterate doodler who has amassed a fan base by tweeting and posting her art on Instagram, created the illustrations for this book in brush marker, gouache, graphite, coloured pencil and charcoal. The result is a scratchy, appealing style that retains the rough liveliness of spontaneous sketches.
Her text, effectively matched to the artwork, has a lively rhythm and reads well out loud, with enough repetition to keep even the very young engaged.
Cummins knows the importance of providing images that can be “read” by those who have
not yet learned to decode text, but who will inevitably look for the characters in a story being read aloud. So, when she opens her book with the traditional “Once upon a time,” these young listeners will quickly seek out the author’s hungry lion, penguin, turtle, calico kitten, brown mouse ( that bit of colour adds just enough detail), bunny with floppy ears and bunny with unfloppy ears ( the latter could be mistaken for a puppy), frog, bat, pig, slightly bigger pig, woolly sheep, koala, “and also a hen.”
That’s the opening cast of characters. But turn the page, and the narrator catches us up with a loud, italicized warning: “Hold on.” And where the opening list totalled 14 characters, the one that follows adds up to only 11. We’re missing a couple of players. Turn the page again and we get another warning from the narrator: “Wait a second.” And this time the spread shows “just a hungry lion, a turtle, only the floppy- eared rabbit, a frog, a bat, and a pig. And apparently? / No one else.”
The next spread features a suspiciously nonchalant lion, whistling a tune, and a confused pig, floppy- eared rabbit and turtle. In other words: “… just a hungry lion and a dwindling assortment of other animals.”
By the time we get down to just the turtle and that hungry lion, we’ve pretty much imagined what fate befell the other animals. But we’d be wrong! Cummins delivers a great surprise, one that will make us heave a sigh of relief.
Until her next tongue- in- cheek surprise. And the one after that.
Spoiler alert: Only the turtle comes out ahead in the end. But, boy, does he look happy!
A Hungry Lion / or A Dwindling Assortment of Animals
By Lucy Ruth Cummins Atheneum, 34 pages, $ 22.99 Ages 4 to 8