Baloney (Henry P.)

Back to my obsession with Lane Smith and Jon Scieszka, I've read this story a few times and am on a roll with my posts. Kids who love space and/or language would love this short story. Every page is "in character", even the title page which says "received and decoded by Jon Scieszka, visual recreation by Lane Smith". How fun! (Interesting that the title page uses all lower case letters and all the text afterwards is in capital letters.)

The story is about Henry P. who is late for school one too many times and is about to be given Permanent Lifelong Detention by his teacher, Miss Bugscuffle. Like many kids who are late and need a good excuse, Henry P. weaves a fanciful tale of, well, baloney. This is really a story that kids can relate to, and is great for figuring out words in context. At first, I thought that words like "zimulus" for pencil and "torraku" for truck were just nonsense words from the imagination of Jon Scieszka. I didn't figure out that these are real words but in a different language until I reached the long decoder in the back! What an awesome idea to have a story with words from languages of the world; this is only a gateway for getting kids excited to learn about foreign languages, and perhaps do some research on their own. Some of the languages represented are Finnish, Uqbaric, Maltest, Melanesian Pidgin, Inuktitut, and Latvian. There are also some fun spoonerisms ("sighing flosser") and transpositions ("cucalations" for calculations). I can only imagine the research that went into writing this book.

Baloney (Henry P.) is also a great start for a lesson on storytelling. Henry has an unbelievable story and each page is difficult to predict! The use of elipses carried the story forward as the reader just wants to know what happens next! I also made a text-to-text connection to Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. In his story, Henry P. lands on the planet Astrosus where he entertains the inhabitants with his "funny piksas". They wanted to eat him, but instead changed their minds and crowned Henry "kuningas" of the whole planet when he marveled them with "giadrams and cucalations". On a side note, I wonder if the Miss Bugscuffle even recognized that these words weren't just nonsense? Where did Henry P. learn all these words? What would you do if one of your students ever told an elaborate story like this, especially considering the language? I might just laugh and say "put it in writing".

The illustrations are so creative and truly caught my attention. With all the action throughout the book, the pictures carried a lot of meaning, especially when trying to figure out the meaning and context of the foreign words. They are a combination of drawings, photographs and what looks like computer graphics. Henry P has big eyes, freckles and looks like a kid.