Stuck

Publishers Weekly

In an exuberantly absurd tale that recalls the old woman who swallowed a fly, a boy named Floyd goes to ridiculous lengths to remove his kite from a tree. Floyd tosses his sneakers, then his cat, into the leafy branches, and when they get stuck, too, he fetches a ladder. “He was going to sort this out once and for all... and up he threw it. I’m sure you can guess what happened.” Each spread pictures Floyd pitching another item into the tree and growing increasingly frustrated: a bike, a kitchen sink, the milkman, a fire truck, and “a curious whale, in the wrong place at the wrong time... and they all got stuck.” Jeffers (The Incredible Book Eating Boy) pictures the extravagant accumulation in abstract pencil-and-gouache doodles, with hand-lettered text to set a conversational tone. The tall, narrow format reinforces the tree’s height in comparison to small, stick-figure Floyd. Jeffers’s droll resolution—the kite comes down, although afterward Floyd “could have sworn there was something he was forgetting”—is testament to the boy’s single-mindedness and the chaos he leaves in his wake. Ages 3–5. (Nov.)

Booklist

"With deceptive simplicity and sophisticated illustration, this comic look at problem solving will have wide appeal."

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 2—Floyd has a problem: his kite is stuck in a tree. Employing kid logic, he throws his favorite shoe to dislodge the wayward object—to no avail. The imaginative hero fetches a host of other items: a friend's bicycle, the kitchen sink, a long-distance lorry, the house across the street, a curious whale ("in the wrong place at the wrong time"). Alas, each item joins its predecessors, lodged in the foliage. Jeffers's deadpan descriptions and the ludicrous scale of Floyd's selections are laugh-out-loud hilarious. As the child carries the house on his head, his neighbor leans out the window, commenting, simply: "Floyd?" Then there is the incongruity between expectation and reality. When he retrieves a ladder, firemen, and finally a saw, readers will surely expect climbing or cutting, but no. Everything gets pitched up, including the light bulb that hovers over the child's head, just before he achieves success. The tree, which continually changes color (and therefore, mood), is a dense, scribbled, layered specimen, perfect for harboring the odd assemblage. The text appears to be hand-lettered, as if written by a youngster. In concert with the quirky, mixed-media caricatures, supported by stick legs, it yields a childlike aesthetic sure to tickle the funny bones of its target audience—and of the adults who share the story with youngsters.—Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library

Kirkus Reviews

Everything but the kitchen sink gets tossed up a tree to help Floyd retrieve his kite--oops, there goes the kitchen sink too! Floyd has one approach, and one approach only, to kite recovery: Throw something up to knock the kite down. He flings up a bucket of paint, the milkman, real trucks, a full-size lighthouse and "a curious whale, in the wrong place at the wrong time." Everything sticks. Jeffers' light-handed illustrations are hilariously droll. Some pages symbolize mood with a single color, boy and tree both murky brown with irritation or red with frustration. The text is handwritten in a childish yet legible scrawl, with liberal use of uppercase letters. The comically deadpan narration never overtells, moving straight from "Floyd fetched Mitch" (a cat) to "Cats get stuck in trees all the time, but this was getting ridiculous." Sometimes Floyd verges on solutions, but he always lapses into the familiar pattern: "Floyd fetched a ladder. He was going to sort this out once and for all… / … and up he threw it. / I'm sure you can guess what happened." Finally, Floyd fetches a saw, holds the blade carefully against the tree trunk--"and hurled it up the tree." The giggle-inducing conclusion leaves some stuff, um, up in the air. Floyd's stubbornness and the smorgasbord-filled tree remain funny through repeated readings, offering kids the special glee of knowing more than the protagonist. (Picture book. 3-6)

Lisa Brown

It's the "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" device, and it works brilliantly. But…it's not the what of the story that makes it so terrific, but the visual how. Jeffers is the master of the scribble: of a cloud, the leaves of the offending tree, the boy's hair, the orangutan's fur, and the burst of Floyd's frustration floating delicately above his head when things really start sticking. Jeffers gives these scribbles ample room with lots of white space, and his expert variation of scale and color keep each page full of energy.
—The New York Times Book Review