Falling Up

By Shel Silverstein
HarperCollins, $16.95

ISBN 0060248025

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Upside down and seeing straight

Review by Etta Wilson

When you hear someone lamenting the self-centeredness and declining morality among today's children, just point out their ongoing love of Shel Silverstein's poems and drawings. His The Giving Tree (published in 1964), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), and A Light in the Attic (1981) have become all-time bestsellers and have been translated into 20 different languages for readers all over the world. Incredible popularity aside, Silverstein always communicates a daring honesty.

Now, after 15 years, he continues his classic approach of combining irreverent poetry and whimsical art in his new release Falling Up. If the amount of pleasure it gives is any measure, it's another winner.

Silverstein has an incredible knack for conveying ordinary experiences with uncommon expressions and hilarious drawings. Sometimes, as in "Show Fish," it's simply a child's forgetting for two weeks to take a dead flounder to school for show and tell (he decides to take it for show and smell); sometimes itŐs a play on language as when a kid literally "grew another foot" on the top of his head in "Short Kid"; and sometimes the humorous point is revealed only in the carefully integrated illustration as in "The Runners," when the "great coach" is shown to be a ferocious lion chasing the team. Readers will also enjoy unforgettable characters like Allison Beals and her 25 eels, Danny O'Dare, the dancin' bear, and Headphone Harold.

Etta Wilson is the Children's Book Editor for this publication.

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