In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty. Pete’s fans might find it groovy anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!” The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude. They are there to entertain, and that they do.Īgain with the bats, evoking another call of “encore!” But the bats never fly over young readers’ heads.

There is no doubt that Lies has made an effort to please adult readers with plenty of allusions: In what passes as their dusk, a bat takes his fiddle to the roof.

The paintings are full of mood and spot-lit color, the bats upside down and right-side up, the rhyme both casual and emotive. The playhouse is anything but, as the bats have decided to light up the dark with “a little night music.” In tuneful couplets laced with fluid if demanding words like “sitar” and “improvise,” the bats get busy with jazz-is that Dizzy, with those cheeks?-and rock-is that Leon Russell, in Uncle Sam’s hat?-and a camellia-adorned bat woman with a broken heart: “Her feelings fill the room with blue,” a room that Lies has draped with indigo. There, he carves out a piece of the small hours for his readers, that strange time of collywobbles and spooky quiet. Lies, who has ushered bats through a night at the library, the beach and the ballpark, invites a colony into a playhouse after lights out. Yet more bats tumble from Lies’ belfry, this time to ignite a darkened summer theater with the gift of music.

Bats at the Library by Brian Lies