I Don’t Like Koala by Sean Ferrell
My rating: 4/5 cats
sometimes i can’t help but feel there’s some kind of goddess of synchronicity guiding my reading choices. it’s eerie.
see, i bought this book here—a picture book about a little boy and a stuffed koala, expecting nothing more than a cute story with adorable pictures. HOWEVER, i did NOT expect it to basically be the jr. version of this horror novella i just read: The Bear Who Wouldn’t Leave.
i read this koala book late last night, and with every page i turned, i became more and more apprehensive about where the story was going to go because in the novella, things did not quite achieve the happily-ever-after ending you generally want to be presenting to your kid right before you abandon them to the darkness of their bedroom so you can go do grown-up things. like eat all the ice cream while you read a young adult novel.
i want to share my experience with you, and i know i risk spoiling two books at once here, but i’m feeling a little reckless so here we go!!
in both stories, a little boy receives a stuffed bear* as a present, and he hates it, believing it to be evil, or in this case the most terrible terrible..
in both stories, the boy tries to get rid of the bear, leaving it in many different places, some quite far from his home.
in both stories, every morning the bear is somehow BACK, with his terrible following eyes:
in both stories, the boy tries to relate to the adults how horrible this bear is, but no one will listen.
and then the stories diverge somewhat, and the parallels become a bit more dubious, although if my english degree is good for anything, it’s for artful bullshittery and persuasive textual observations; making comparisons where no one had detected similarities before. so i could do it, but it would definitely be too granular for anyone who has not read both works, and it would definitely risk spoilers. i mean, if a thirty page picture book could ever be “spoiled.”
to focus on the book itself instead of some situation only relevant to me—it’s pretty adorable, although i’m not quite sure why this kid hates this koala so much. while it’s true it looks more like an owl than any koala i’ve ever seen:
and birds are inherently evil, there’s nothing else overtly evil about it; certainly not to the extent that you’d need to hike a million miles to dispose of the thing.
this one is way eviler:
having a stuffed animal come back to you again and again like a boomerang isn’t necessarily evil—i’d like for more of my possessions to have this feature: anti-theft, anti-loss, anti-fire damage…everyone wins!
but kids don’t always have the most developed sense of perspective, so i guess i can understand why this would be horrifying and not a really great selling point.
it’s a cute book whose message seems to be “don’t just hate on things and get freaked out by them until you honestly assess the ways in which they might be useful to you one day.” which might be a cynical reading of the book. but it’s better than “if someone gives you a gift and you hate it and try to throw it away and complain about it to them all the time, your guilt over acting like a little brat will haunt you every single night and follow you for the rest of your life.”
sweet dreams!
* step off, biologists! i know that a koala isn’t technically a bear, but if you’re gonna slap the word “bear” into something’s colloquial name, i’m gonna be forced to refer to it as a bear when making astute literary criticisms. FORCED!!
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