The Tweedles Go Online

Gr 1–3—In their second outing, the quirky and energetic family, introduced in The Tweedles Go Electric (Groundwood, 2014), install a telephone. While son Frankie dotes exclusively on the electric car they bought in the first book and Father remains warily focused on his automobile, daughter Franny and Mother embrace the new technology gleefully. Maybe a little too enthusiastically. Where the first book cleverly nodded to a modern sensibility regarding green energy within an early 20th-century tale, this book's attempts to wedge in current questions of privacy and technology addiction merely fracture the plot, producing an unsatisfying story and confusing anachronistic behavior. Franny finds herself hooked on the phone, chatting away at all hours (to whom, readers might wonder), until she decides that she must cut herself off. But when a perplexing calamity threatens and a neighbor tries to alert them by telephone, the whole family agrees on the contraption's real value. The digitally colored graphite and mixed-media illustrations offer the same off-kilter charm as the first book—Mother's sculptural hairdo remains a masterpiece—and the Tweedle family maintains a delightful visual exuberance the second time around.