Clowns on Vacation

Publishers Weekly

This comical yet awkwardly realized volume imagines how four circus clowns, their elephant and their dog pass their downtime, including forays to beach and desert destinations. Each spread poses queries that demand a close look at the images, which are a muddle of intense colors and cutout photos. One page pictures a five-star resort next to a brick tenement with an Always Vacant sign: Along the way, Where do they stay? In a fancy hotel Or a bad one that smells? The answer is neither, as it turns out. Four pairs of floppy shoes rest outside a patched Little Top tent, suggesting that the clowns bring their own accommodations. Laden's (Bad Dog) jokes are in the details. At the shore, a girl clown buries the elephant in the sand while her brother digs for seashells and unearths a cell phone. Their father sips lemonade from a water-cooler while their mother covers her shell-white face with clown tan (they never remove their red noses or makeup). Before returning home, the group finds the treasure of Billy the Kidder, drops by Las Vegas, and gets stuck in traffic when a glue truck tips over. Laden's book is chockablock with tepid sight gags, but her uneven rhymes and the garish colors and clutter of some of the collages are off-putting. Clowns are known for organized chaos, and this book needs better choreography. Ages 4-8. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Children's Literature

It's hard to say whether most children have ever wondered where clowns go on vacation, but if they have, Nina Laden supplies a series of provocative questions and possible answers as the clown family and an elephant pack their bags and travel by land and sea. The slapstick illustrations in gouache and photomontage are bright and busy, full of puns, goofy details, and skewed perspectives. The clowns caper at the beach, make a totem pole with ice cream cones, and scale a rocky canyon (among other things.) Ever smiling and manic, they return to the circus and burst into the ring just in time for another performance. Young readers will find lots to talk and laugh about as they romp through the rhyming text either alone or, especially, share with a friend. Parents and teachers may want to point out to children who have never seen a circus that clowns are really entertainers in makeup and costume and not an exotic species, as some seem to believe. This book might be used in the classroom as a model for a question and answer format, as inspiration for designing and writing postcards or creating collages, or just for the sheer fun of it. Young publishers should check out the patchwork endpapers (have you ever imagined the Mona Lisa with a clown nose?) 2002, Walker, Talcroft

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1-Readers follow a clown family-complete with dog and elephant-on hiatus as they flit from locale to locale and experience the sights in a uniquely antic fashion. The clowns are fired from cannons for air travel, have a choice of "Clown White" or "Clown Tan" for sunscreen, and sleep in a tent called "The Little Top." By juxtaposing typical tourist experiences (getting lost, buying souvenirs, sending postcards, and taking photos) with exaggerated interpretations, Laden gives free rein to visual humor both broad and subtle. Travel-savvy adults, however, may catch more of the manic humor than children. The full-page, double-spread illustrations done in photomontage and gouache are bright but so busy that readers may find it hard to follow the action. Although the cartoon style lends itself to the circus theme, the rigidity of the facial makeup results in an eerie sameness to most of the clowns' faces. In places, the rhyme is forced and, by trying to incorporate a wide range of tourist clich s, the text becomes overlong and drags, slowing the book's pace. Like an acrobat just missing the flying trapeze, this offering has a lot of flash and dazzle, but ultimately falls flat.-Marge Loch-Wouters, Menasha's Public Library, WI Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

What do clowns do to unwind? Following a family of performers permanently decked out in wildly patched outfits and bulb noses (even the dog), the author/illustrator of Bad Dog (2000) and other free-spirited romps proposes a more-or-less rhymed string of alternatives. Laden asks intriguing questions: "Do they play in the sand / Or read in the shade? / Can clowns get a tan / And drink lemonade? When clowns get hungry, / What do they eat? / . . . What's a clown's favorite treat?" Stretched out on a beach or shivering on an iceberg, visiting roadside attractions or trying to find them ("Welcome to LOST," reads a billboard, "Population: you"), climbing cliffs or exploring caves, Laden's motley vacationers, with a permanently nonplused elephant tagging along, caper through scenes replete with jokes both verbal (a beach novel bears a "Quirkus Review" cover quote) and visual. In the end, it's back to the Big Top, though, thanks to a massive glue spill and other mishaps, the clowns make a late, not entirely controlled, entrance. Ladeeeeez and Gentlemen: better sit down, before you fall down laughing. (Picture book. 6-8)