Speaking Volumes

 Lane Smith’s latest picture book, titled It’s a Book, arrived in the mail today.
 
                            
 
In it, a tech-savvy donkey works on his laptop while asking his gorilla friend a bunch of annoying questions about the book he is reading – “Can you blog with it? How do you scroll down? Can it tweet?” When the donkey starts reading the book he becomes completely engrossed, but promises the gorilla, "I'll charge it up when I'm done!" To which the mouse (hidden under the gorilla’s hat) delivers the final punch line… “It’s a book, jackass.”
 
    
 
I am a fan of Lane Smith and I like this book - I think it’s a clever commentary on what’s happening to books in our digital age. But, even before it arrived at our library it was generating a lot of talk - especially among fellow librarians, who don’t know where to put it. I mean, it IS a picture book, written and illustrated by a children’s author, and advertised for readers ages 4 – 8. But, many librarians are reluctant to shelve it with all the other picture books in their collections. Some seem worried about the last page of the book, where the mouse calls the jackass a ‘jackass.’ Others just think the humor is geared to adults. As I’ve been following the debate among my fellow librarians, I’ve been trying to decide myself where to put it. The punch line doesn’t bother me (in fact check out Lane Smith’s blog post about jackasses in children’s lit). But, I do think the joke is going to be lost on young kids. My guess is that many kids, even the computer savvy ones, don’t know what tweeting, blogging, or wifi is, and the whole thing is going to go right over their heads.
 
Well, as we were chatting about this in our office, our cataloger offered to ‘test’ out the book on her granddaughter. Her granddaughter read it, and laughed.  She thought it was funny - even though she didn’t know what ‘tweets’ and blogs were. When our cataloger asked her what she thought about the last line and pointed at the donkey, her granddaughter said she thought that the donkey was a rabbit!
 
I guess it goes to show how hard it is to predict what kids are thinking. Come check out the book yourself and let me know what you think!