Just one more story about Miles–after deciphering the peculiar mysteries of the Thank-You Note, he wanted to hear a story, so for reasons of propinquity as much as anything else (Richard handed a copy to me lazing on the couch), I started in on Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

Elizabeth Bluemle at ShelfTalker has a good essay up about longer picture books, and let me tell you, Mike Mulligan is looong, or at least it seemed so to us. Not needlessly long–all of Burton’s repeated phrases roll out in fine incantatory cadence–but every time I turned the page I felt dismayed at what looked like the increasingly enormous amount of  text to get through. (And the ending gave us each our own problems: California kid Miles didn’t know from furnaces or basements while I was inwardly shuddering at the Giving Tree-like conclusion of the formerly free-rolling Mary Anne’s acquiescence to a life sitting still in the dark.) But was the book always long? Does it only seem long now? Or are Miles and I just millennial slackers?

***

Back in the office, I faced another picture-book dilemma. Siân brought to my desk a copy of Bruce Springsteen and Frank Caruso’s Outlaw Pete, asking if I thought it was a children’s book. She needed to know because the Horn Book Guide reviews only children’s books and didn’t want to let a ringer in. With its picture-book trim size and its cover illustration of a baby in diapers and a ten-gallon hat, it certainly looks like a children’s book, but while the flap copy says “Outlaw Pete is an adult book,” an afterword by Springsteen says “I’m not sure this a children’s book,” implying that it is being published as one.

Now, I haven’t liked a song-texted picture book since Steven Kellogg’s edition of Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, and I don’t know the song this one is based on (although you can almost sing it to the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies), but what I really don’t like are adult books disguised as books for young readers (Giving Tree, looking back up at you). Like The Boss, though, I’m not sure this is one of those. But does it look like one on purpose? Cause, see, I hate that.

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