Elmer and the Monster


I came home from work today, bathed La Serpiente, read her a couple of books and then went back out to more work meetings. Today I’ve been working (or in meetings) for more than 12 hours. This is beginning to feel slightly unbalanced. But at least I had time to read to my daughter about an elephant, and console her when she continued to feel a bit rough after the last few days’ illness.

Elmer and the Monster is a story about Elmer, an idiosyncratically coloured elephant who wanders around the jungle, and is unfazed by loud roars. Every other animal in the (somewhat implausible) jungle runs away in terror – both lions and tigers, which is where it begins to become a little geographically unfeasible – but Elmer calmly walks around until he finds the source of the roar.

I won’t break the incredible twist at the end of Elmer and the Monster, but suffice it to say it’s the very height of Hitchcockian misdirection. It’s more unexpected than the last hour of Transformers IV. It’s … it’s … well, it’s a large book with thick hard covers about an elephant and his various animal chums.

It does teach children a valuable lesson about not making assumptions, but at the same time this book delivers no value from a biological perspective. There are also no dinosaurs in it. (We bought Destroyer a tag blanket this weekend, decorated with dinosaurs, and that meant that today I was pursued by La Serpiente, requesting “Have a name?” while indicating what turned out to be a Dimetrodon. Thanks, Wikipedia. I would just have called it “the one with the big fin on its back” but you saved me from appearing ignorant to a two-year-old child.

On the positive side, no matter how misleading Elmer and the Monster is about the peaceful coexistence of crocodiles and elephants, it makes no unwise claims about the fair distribution of pie. So it’s got that going for it.

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