G1 Review: Bebé Goes Shopping

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Elya, Susan Middleton. 2006. BEBÉ GOES SHOPPING. Ill by Steven Salerno. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. ISBN: 9780152054267

As its title suggests, this story centers on the exploits of “Bebé” during a shopping trip with his mother. At first, Bebé is agape and amazed by the size and variety of items in the supermarket. Strapped into his shopping cart, he soon sees familiar and brightly colored items and begins reaching for them. This is helpful to his mother the first time, and she rewards him with a gratifying kiss. However, she becomes more and more exasperated over the next few scenes as he continues grasping and grabbing mischievously, generally personifying the expression “terrible twos.” At the end of her tether, she finally finds a box of animal crackers to placate her son, who comically proceeds to chomp his way through the box while she finishes her shopping and happily exits the store.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
This funny story is geared toward younger readers and, with its “troublemaking” but extremely cute baby, has something in it for anyone who has ever shopped with a toddler. Elya’s text is done in rhymed couplets and is interspersed with Spanish words in a bold typeface. With Salerno’s drawings, contextual explanations, and the use of cognates such as “muchos colores,” these new vocabulary words are easily comprehensible to readers without Spanish knowledge. For those curious to learn Spanish or to consolidate their understanding of the vocabulary in the text, there is a helpful glossary after the story.

Each two-page spread has a minimal number of words, usually in two to four lines consisting of 11 or 12 syllables. The general stress pattern seems to be iambic, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, but this is not consistent. (Readers will have to improvise at times when reading to someone else.) Overall, though, the use of rhymed lines creates a mellifluous ease to the text, allowing its reader a chance to emphasize certain important words or concepts and its listener to get caught up in an entertaining story.

One feature of the text worth noting is the use of pauses, in the form of dashes and both ending and internal punctuation. At the beginning of the book and after Bebé finally gets mollified with his animal crackers, Elya uses long dashes liberally, largely as a means of explaining a word or concept, as in “the supermercado—with groceries galore” and “Bebé finds a camel—a humpy sorpresa.”

Nearly all of the lines in the story have end punctuation, and only a handful lack internal punctuation, a period, comma or exclamation mark. These natural pauses and stops force the reader to take a breather and also highlight important parts of the action: “Just play with my llaves,” she says. “¡Por favor!”/He giggles and drops them. They clank on the floor.” At these points of the story, imagining comments from the audience on Bebé’s actions and Mamá’s responses to them would be very easy and perhaps make the reading more interactive.

The beautiful illustrations work in conjunction with the text to make this a winning story. Done in watercolor, colored pencil and ink, they begin with items in the supermarket drawn in bold bright strokes. In both the characters and backgrounds, Salerno rarely pays attention to staying within the lines when adding color, leading to watercolors leaking out of the colored ink borders and, in some cases, unexpected white space that almost serves as a shadow. The vegetables and dry goods in the first scene show this technique very well. Similar to the text, the illustrations have a certain focal point, with something always at the center drawn in enough detail to attract the viewer’s eye.

Interestingly, just as the lines provide points of emphasis, so do the illustrations. For the characters, drawn almost in caricature, Bebé and Mamá each have oblong heads and rosy cheeks. In Bebé’s case, his head is oversized with a tuft of curly hair on top, suggesting that he may be a “thinker” (or a conniver) even at a young age. The mother has a curvy figure and roseate cheeks, indicating that she may be new to child-rearing. Other characters in the book are drawn more angularly, but all of them have an almost comic book feeling about them: realistic but somehow not.

Salerno has made the eyes, eyebrows and mouths carry the characters’ emotions and, at each major emotional shift, uses a background color to support those feelings. A kiss between mother and child results in closed eyes for each and smiles all around on a soft blue background. Confusion appears on a white background with broad, wavy, vertical yellow lines, as Bebé opens his eyes wide and arches his pencil-line eyebrows toward the center of his forehead. Anger jumps with a kicking baby and finger-pointing mother, each with open eyes, snarling mouths and scowling eyebrows on a soft reddish pink background. The animals in the animal cracker box also show “Why me?” expressions after Bebé begins eating them.

The scenes move from a certain packed-in feeling at the beginning of the story, perhaps to suggest Bebé’s amazement at the possibilities the market holds for him, to a sparseness that better showcases his individual moments of mischief. Until the last scene at the checkout counter, Salerno uses an abundance of white space and wavy brushstrokes of soft colors to divide the characters’ actions into smaller, digestible bits, complementing the lines of text.

The story is, in a sense, a string of events with all eyes constantly on Bebé, who goes through a number of emotions. While he angers his mother, he is also indulged by her and others at the supermarket. Most notably, in what may be the “moral” of the story, or simply something for all parents to remember, a “nosy senora” imposes on the younger mother who’s at the end of her tether, reminding her about children, “It’s hard to be good when there’s nothing to do.” The mother then gives Bebé the animal crackers and is able to complete her shopping. At the end of the story, the mother seems relieved and even goes so far as to call her son “her wonderful helper.” All sins are forgiven…until the next shopping trip.


REVIEW EXCERPT(S)
--"English-only and bilingual readers will enjoy the bouncing rhythm and buoyant illustrations." (SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, May 2006)
--"Salerno's cheerful, energetic swirls of color and line, ample white space and changing perspectives transform an everyday outing into a dramatic adventure that will leave readers smiling." (KIRKUS REVIEWS, March 2006)
--"This delightful tale turns an everyday chore into a lively adventure, brimming with entertainment and enjoyment for all." (PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, February 2006)
--"Fantastico!" (BOOKLIST, February 2006)

CONNECTIONS
--This is an excellent way to introduce the family to an additional language, as are many other titles by Susan Middleton Elya and also the board books of Gladys Rosa-Mendoza.
--A book such as this could benefit older students learning rhythm and rhyme, to examine both its successes and areas for improvement.
--Big fans of Bebé would probably not want to miss BEBÉ GOES TO THE BEACH, by Susan Middleton Elya. ISBN: 9780152060008