Joelle Jolivet

There was a time in my life when I did not know that I greatly enjoyed oversize books with woodcut illustrations of animal species. That time is gone, since we are now the proud owners of both Zoo-ology and Almost Everything, both illustrated by Jolivet and originally published in France. They both are indubitably French, but the former is greatly preferable to the latter since Zoo-ology's Frenchness comes out mainly in the way that the animal illustrations are classed in odd categories ("Hot," "With Horns," "Black and White"). Almost Everything has both a frankness about the naked human body uncommon to U.S. picture books, which is okay, and a strange fascination with the exoticism of ethnic costume, which kind of is not. Not to mention that the book certainly does not cover almost everything; where are books? computers? washing machines? disposable diapers? Trader Joe's frozen meatballs? the other fundamental pieces of my daily existence?

Now we have borrowed from the library 365 Penguins, illustrated by Jolivet with a slightly less folkloric and more mid-century modern style than the encyclopedia books. The text, by Jean-Luc Fromenthal, is...odd; it's half math lesson (how many penguins can fit in 12 drawers that hold 12 penguins each?) and half environmental harangue. Unfortunately, (or fortunately), the oddest part of the book, in which the eccentric uncle shows up to explain that he has sent this hapless family the titular penguins for the purpose of illegally smuggling them from the North Pole to the South Pole, is totally uninteresting to Older Kid and Younger Kid. They greatly delight, however, in the penguin induced chaos--fish bones in the piano, etc.--which is to me the scariest part of the book.