#Bone gag pink plus#

This is what we’re coming to both love and expect from Cotter and Morgan: books that honour the humour, the madness, the effervescent shine and bravery of children and the adults (and animals) that love them. We’re allowed to stand out from the crowd and celebrate our inventions and our sparkle. The journey of the book is less emotionally impactful than The Bomb, which I can’t read without getting a voice wobble towards the end, but it makes for a loud, pink companion piece to affirm the idea that we all have the right to defy convention and veer away from the standard conception of what we’re meant to do and be. Dazzlehands.” You can imagine a comedic actor going to town with this unequivocal, deadpan dude, bringing the audience to near-chaos, either screeching in support of Farmer, or starting to get that pigs, actually, can really dazzle. Pig, poker-faced behind his sunglasses, is persistent af: “Dazzlehands. The layout of the pages emphasises the comedy of the confrontation, too. Not only does Pig enable word-tastic anarchy, but Farmer’s eventual meltdown perfectly mirror’s a child’s arm-flailing indignation: “Noooooooooo! It’s oink! They’re hooves!” There’s nothing kids love more than permission to go nuts, move their bodies, hurl their voices. The language is fun, the rhyming is impeccable (there are too many books that don’t rhyme well enough – this is not one of them), and it rockets along with a musicality that begs for physical response. Bursting with the razzle, gotta liberate these dazzlehands.”

“Cross hands, floss hands, work it like a boss hands. Sacha Cotter is a genius at rhyme married with rhythm and this is where Dazzlehands comes alive. Disrupting the collectively understood language of our animals might seem like a crisp joke, but everything in this book is designed to hook the readers in, hold them in thrall and move them along at the same time.

The danger with contemplating a children’s book is the illusion of simplicity. He immediately got the gag and from there on in we were laughing. “Pigs don’t go Dazzlehands!” shouted my son on our first read, the beginnings of outright hysteria lacing his giggle. He’s fresh and young and he quickly becomes exasperated with his pig. He wears bright blue and green trackpants with a matching 80s-style shell suit top he has a lush curly mullet with the sides shaved and yellow aviators stick out of his chest pocket. Little readers will immediately feel at home here, particularly because Farmer is cleverly set up as a conduit for the young audience. The language initially mirrors the perennial Gecko Press bestseller, The Noisy Book, as we begin with Farmer (we’ll come to him soon) trying to coax his familiar cast of animals to say what we all expect: “A cow goes moo. All of this to say: the name hit me in the nostalgia bone and I could not wait to see how jazz was going to transcend into dazzle.įor the kids, Dazzlehands is steeped in familiar but terrifically updated territory: the farm.

#Bone gag pink plus#

Joey from Friends is partially to blame (the one where he gets asked to teach choreography when his fake resume is taken seriously) then Kirsten Dunst’s cheerleader movie, Bring it On, cartwheeled in with the horrific “spirit fingers” scene and after that the singing, dancing, jazz-handsing teens of the TV show, Glee plus the American Office ( Dwight doing jazz hands ). Fellow elder millennials may resonate with the idea that jazz hands seemed to be a regular motif within cringe comedies of the 90s-early 2000s.