Give Me Back My Bones!
Kim Norman and Bob Kolar
Walker Books
‘A stormy night has passed here /and toppled every mast here./The ocean flowing fast here,/has scattered all my bones!’ But from who or what is this making this claim on the opening spread, readers will wonder.
A page turn reveals a skull and thereafter Kim Norman’s spirited rhyming narrative cleverly introduces each vertebra from the skeleton using both the scientific name and an everyday one: ‘Give me back my breastbone,/ the centre of my chest bone, / the hold-my-ribs-the-best bone – / return my sturdy sternum.’
As the story progresses we realise it’s a pirate skeleton that, with our help, is putting himself back together piece by piece from among the marine flora and fauna Bob Kolar has scattered collage-style on the ocean bed.
Love the generous sprinkling of alliteration – ‘I claim my clavicle
… that armpit-of-alarm bone – I hanker for my humerus’ , … I miss my metatarsals’, as well as the other playful language that’s part and parcel of this bone-rattling reclamation, which finally sees the reconstructed skeleton proudly standing before all that have helped complete him …
Don’t miss the endpapers – the front shows all the disparate skeleton components, the end ones display the cutlass waving salt.
Anatomy with a mock scary twist: Avast me hearties, go grab yourselves a copy of this rattling good book. ARRRR!
