Caldecott Medal Contender: Bob, Not Bob!

by Sam Juliano

Few things in life are as nagging and uncomfortable as a stuffy nose.  More often than not your breathing is negotiated through the mouth after a runny nose and the ensuing mucus impede the normal coordinated mode.  Taste and smell are mitigated and the voice can be comically compromised.  Usually, the person maligned with the most severe of colds loses interest in doing anything until they are given some measure of medical reprieve.   For a young boy the latter restriction can bring an entirely new meaning to domestic communication when signals are crossed, causing a normally welcome visitor immediate access to one’s unwanted list.  The African American protagonist who is the center of a markedly intimate domestic rhubarb in Liz Garton Scanlon and Audrey Vernick’s tumultuous Bob, Not Bob! has undergone an attitude and behavioral metamorphosis, one completely reliant on a mother’s unbridled attention.  In Bob, Not Bob! by Liz Garton Scanlon and Audrey Vernick, with illustrations by Matthew Cordell, a boy is forced to suspend his favorite activities and rely on parental doting.  Alas not everyone is in his shoes.

Though Little Louie’s prominence in this tale of nasal congestion and all the bedlam it can cause in a household is  abundantly clear on the book’s three member front cover dynamic and end papers of the bawling tot clinging to his mom’s leg he is pictured confidently standing on a rock with one leg on the first page of the text, where the writing duo declare: Little Louie wasn’t all that little.  It wasn’t like he needed his mom every minute of the day.  But all bets are off after a single ah-Choooo! launches perhaps the most memorable sick time spent in a house since Camilla Cream came down with the strangest of maladies in the 1998 Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon.  As a clock ticks and tocks Louie’s mom is shown attending to her charge, carrying a bowl of soup, measuring a dose of medicine and taking his temperature in three minute intervals. Cordell shows Louie in several stages of congestion, but as is the case with just about everyone in the grip of a head cold, it always comes down to the havoc it wreaks on Pinocchio’s most ubiquitous feature.  In such a  lamentable state all normally welcome activities such as coloring, watching television or even shooting baskets with his own wadded up tissues had zero appeal to an especially unhappy camper.  Though a tiny concession to his fondness for hot chocolate   Cordell’s sublime, trademark uncluttered scratch board pen and ink, watercolor minimalism is the perfect tonic for such a “poor baby” scenario.  The exclamatory request for “Bob!,” which readers of course will understand it really for “Mom” because of the heart shaped “O” but also because all young kids with a bad cold want mom around 24-7.

With “Mom” sounding like “Bob” in Nasal English, the family’s slobbering baseball-clenching Dalmatian,  named  Bob takes his cue and dashes to comfort a boy who is hardly in the mood for canine camaraderie.  A reader can sympathize with the boy’s frustration at saying something only to have the sound of it something quite different, but young readers will always be beside themselves with laughter after reading or being read his frantic No! I wan by Bob (heart shaped O), not Bob!  Bob! (heart) Bob! (heart) Bob! (heart).  In any house with such unbridled commotion, the family matriarch is sure to take notice and Louie’s mom arrives to ask about the yelling.  Louie is clearly an animal lover as can be observed with wall pictures of a cat and a dog seeing to be Bob, and a bird is perched on a branch outside his window looking in, but with stuffy nose there can be no engagement of any kind.  Cordell’s masterful use of font is again exhibited with an overhead lineup, that drags out “Uhh” to the moaning sound of twenty-five letter “h” marks.

Before Louie’s cold got any better it got worse.  The authors note that “His lips chapped and his eyes gunked” but worst of all the nose congestion at the very least stayed the course.  Cordell visualizes this with a melting pot of auditory symbols, including a stop sign, an unhappy smily, a thumbs down, wilting sunflower, a crying face and many others in a hodgepodge of images that left him confused and distraught.  translation this illustration to a keyboard would be something like %#!*#!&#@!  His sister failed to alleviate his clear feverishness, by failing to decipher her brother’s new language, mistaking “hot and sweaty” for a person named Hotten Smetty.  But such is the case of congestion alternating speech.  Again Louie calls out for his Mom (Bob with heart) only to give notice to Bob, who once again seems flattered by all the attention.  Louie tries to correct the request No! Bob! (with heart) Not Bob!  The authors assert Tessa looked at him like he was cuckoo.  So did Bob.  Cordell’s depiction of Louie covered by a blanket is one of mounting frustration.  The tissue box has been called on quite a bit.

The funniest lines from Louie are the ones translated in English by Scanlon and Vernick.  I doan wan by bedicine.  I doan wanda bubba bat.  And I doan wanda dap.  (asterik:  I don’t want my medicine.  I don’t want a bubble bath.  And I don’t want a nap.)  Louie ends his tirade with a simple request:  I just wan by Bob! (with a heart).  By this point in the exasperating domestic siege Mom (a.k.a. Bob with a heart) has been through the proverbial wringer.  Cordell’s bold green lettering and the depiction of Mom with Louie grasping her legs is the very picture of the serious crisis wrought by an especially indulgent and impatient tot.  With the real “Bob” set to dash the moment his ears decipher the nasal false alarm disruption morphs into havoc.  Cordell’s depiction of a giddy canine tuned only to a spoken order and not to any matter of misrepresentation.  Again the illustrator shows the human parts of this household maelstrom aghast at canine commotion in topsy turvy mode.  For this spread and in fact all others in the book the attractive milk white paper is part and parcel to the book’s excellent employment of space, resulting in art that really stands out vividly.

The old saying “if you can’t beat em, join em” manifests in the cuddly union of mom, Louie and Bob on the bed one of Cordell’s most irresistible tapestries, one affirming that the love in this house is far deeper than any temporary inconveniences that might strain the sturdy dynamic.  The bed mattress design, etched with star shaped dabs of color and the squiggly lines that the illustrator is famed for could be aptly titled “the calm after the storm.”  From there everything improves as Louie’s nasal congestion finally disappears and he is more than happy to entertain his beloved Bob, whom he calls with serious intent.  The vignettes should bring plenty of smiles to young and adult readers, though inevitably engagement has a price and Mom takes the fall in a visual definition of the word “contagious.”  Kids will laugh themselves silly, adults will render a knowing smile.

Though Bob, Not Bob! has earned induction to the Read Aloud Hall of Fame in Kidsville, Nebraska, it is actually one of a trio of illustrative successes for Cordell that seemingly have him sitting at the top of the world in 2017.  His brilliant solo effort Wolf in the Snow, released back in early January is a top-flight contender for the Caldecott Medal after repeated mention by book critics, classroom teachers and librarians on their own year end lists, and his dazzling collaboration with Philip Stead on The Only Fish in the Sea has been widely known to inspire comic disruptions in libraries, and more than a few warnings from the personnel in the children’s sections.  Though the mid-west based artist has illustrated some popular and critically-praised children’s books in a prolific career, his hat trick of 2017, with all three turning up aces is a rare achievement.  Bob, Not Bob! (To be read as through you have the worst cold ever) represents another big success for Scanlon, who among many distinguished works, penned the Caldecott Honor winning All the World, and for Vernick, who has written twenty children’s books including First Grade Dropout.  The Caldecott Committee have plenty of books to consider when they begin deliberation on or around February 12th.  Matthew Cordell’s hat trick is sure to be a major consideration.  First it was an intrepid girl in a ferocious snowstorm and then at around the same juncture another girl with a nautical focus and a boy stricken with a nagging cold.  These players should keep the members doing overtime.

Note:  This is the twenty-sixth entry in the 2017 Caldecott Medal Contender series.  The annual venture does not purport to predict what the committee will choose, rather it attempts to gauge what the writer feels should be in the running.  In most instances the books that are featured in the series have been touted as contenders in various online round-ups, but for the ones that are not, the inclusions are a humble plea to the committee for consideration.  It is anticipated the series will include in the neighborhood of around 30 titles; the order which they are being presented in is arbitrary, as every book in this series is a contender.  Some of my top favorites of the lot will be done near the end.  The awards will be announced in mid-February, hence the reviews will continue until around the end of January or through the first week of February.

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