Icetown, inhabited solely by penguins, is an architectural fantasy, splendid with a new ice hotel, designed by Elephant, who gets invited back to celebrate his creation.
Amid the festivities, the giant snowball Elephant is riding goes haywire and smashes into the hotel. With the help of all the penguins, matters are soon set aright. Readers will be left with a deep affection for the penguins, who treat each other with unfailing courtesy and rationality, offering us a model for behavior that encourages both civility and thriving commerce. The entire tale intriguingly takes place on two levels: the detailed primary illustrations, which then are platonically repeated in a shadow play against the icy landscape and the wintry sky.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams and Caldecott winner Stephen Gammell make a formidable team as they create a fantastical, airy creature who plays in snowflakes and naps on the bottom rung of the number eight in “How the Nobble Was Finally Found.’’ Even though the Nobble is over 4,000 years old, he has managed to escape notice because he hangs out in unlikely places such as the space between Wednesday and Thursday.
When the Nobble ventures forth into our world, he encounters forbidding square-box buildings and scary noise-making dogs and cats, and, finally, a little girl who shouts: Why don’t you pick up the phone? And that’s where this book becomes different, magical, and in a class by itself.
Throughout the book, Williams heads off on crazy linguistic riffs, and the story of the Nobble becomes poetry. Nonsense poetry, perhaps, but real poetry, which may be just about the rarest thing in children’s books today.
And the bug-eyed Nobbles truly come alive in Gammell’s wild, ink-spattered universe. The inherent sweetness of the Nobbles themselves makes their pictorial oddity somehow, in spite of themselves, thoroughly endearing.
