Review #33: How Are You Peeling

Dad:  It's time for "How Are You Peeling..."
Gracie (age 8):  "...Foods With Moods."
Dad:  And the guys who made this book have great names: Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers.
Isaac (age 10):  It sounds like a "Juice" guy.
Dad:  What is the interesting thing about this book?  How is this different from other books?
Isaac:  Vegetables!
Gracie:  This book is about a whole bunch of different moods.
Isaac:  And vegetables and fruits!
Gracie:  A "mood" is how you are feeling -- if you are feeling happy or feeling sad.  And this whole book is told with food, because the guy that does the pictures goes to the store, buys a bunch of food, and carves in faces.
Lily (age 6):  He puts eyes on the food, and sometimes he carves mouths and noses.  Actually, I bet he doesn't carve the noses.  Then he takes pictures of them.
Gracie:  But sometimes he doesn't carve the food at all.  Sometimes the faces are already there!
Isaac:  Mostly he tries to find weird looking fruits.  Like this one... he really found an apple that looked like that.
Gracie:  It's an apple with a big hole in it, and the guy didn't carve it.
Lily:  He actually found that real dent in an apple.  He was like, "Oh, that could be good -- I'm going to use it for my character!"
Dad:  And that's probably an apple most people would have skipped over.  Most people would say, "Eww... I don't want that apple..."  But he saw it and thought, "That's my book, baby!  I take all the weirdies!"
Kids:  Ha ha ha ha ha!
Isaac:  Woah!  Look at that one!  It's a weirdie!
Dad:  Putting faces on food isn't a completely new idea.  Can you think of a food that everybody already carves?
Isaac:  Tomatoes.
...pause followed by laughter
Dad:  Who carves tomatoes?!
Gracie:  Pumpkins!  Pumpkins!!
Dad:  There you go.  Winner!  We have a winner!
Lily:  People carve pumpkins for Halloween.
Dad:  But these guys thought, "Why not oranges?"
Gracie:  Why not strawberries?
Lily:  There's no pumpkins in this book at all.
Isaac:  They'd probably get a weirdie pumpkin or turn the stem into a nose.
Dad:  So when you illustrate a book, do you have to use pencils or paints?
Isaac:  No, you can take photographs.
Gracie:  You can do it with food!
Isaac:  I did something like this once!  I used Gracie and Lily's dollhouse set, and I took my camera, and I zoomed in so that it looked like a real room, and I took a picture of it.  Then I stuck a banana in the dollhouse, and I zoomed in the same way, and took another picture, and it made it look like a giant banana appeared in the room.
Dad:  Can you describe some of the pictures in this book?
Isaac:  Sometimes they have to combine three foods.  The turtle has a seed for the eye, a pepper for the head, and a melon for the shell.
Gracie:  I like the little radish guys.  There are these tiny, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, little radishes.  And there's this giant yellow melon or something...
Isaac:  Squash.
Gracie: ...this giant yellow squash, and the radishes are freaking him out.  And the squash is, like, eleven times their size...
Isaac:  Nine times.
Gracie: ...nine times their size.  The radish is this teeny-tiny guy with an open mouth, screaming at the squash.  And the radish has a pointy stick nose.  Some of the other radishes have curvy noses...  I love them!
Isaac:  Here's another one of those weirdies.
Dad:  Yeah, they hardly did anything to that pepper.  All they did was add eyes.  The natural folds make all the expression.
Isaac:  He was a weirdie.
Gracie:  He looks like one of those bulldogs.
Isaac:  There are tons of weirdies on this page!
Dad:  That one looks like baby Evie.
Isaac:  Oh, for the love...
Lily:  Look at tha-ha-ha-hat!
Isaac:  He has weird teeth.  He looks evil.
Dad:  Who?  The orange?
Gracie:  Do you think the guys that make the book eat the food afterward?
Isaac:  "Hello, I'm going to eat you, big teeth guy."
Lily:  I like this one - he's cute.  He's a lemon.  He doesn't have freaky teeth.  I like the ones that don't have freaky teeth.  But this one is sad.  He's feeling very sad.
Dad:  You like the sad ones?
Lily:  No.  I like the ones that don't have freaky teeth.  I like to eat lemons too.  They are sour and good!  But I haven't had one for ages.
Isaac:  I saw in a magazine how he makes these pictures.  That would be fun to do.  For this review, we could go to the grocery store...
Dad:  That IS what we're going to do.
Isaac:  It is!?!
Dad:  Yep!
Isaac:  I want to find a piece of food, a vegetable, that looks weird.  I want to get a weirdie vegetable.
Gracie:  I am going to find the weirdie-est one of all!
Lily:  Me too!  I'm going to find the second weirdie-est one of all.
Gracie:  I want to eeeeeeeat something.
Dad:  Did that book make you hungry?
Gracie:  Now I want to eat a kiwi.  I want to eat that kiwi.  The one that's going, "Aaaaaghhhhh!"

pear bird & melon guy, by Lily

lemon man & potato seal, by Gracie

beet creature & pear mouse, by Isaac

I have to say, the whole process of shopping for these foods and bringing them to life was a blast!  Here's one last group shot:



The kids also had fun eating them when we were all done.  Here are some funny picts I got when little brother Elijah started digging in:

 


Creators: Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers
Published, 1999: Arthur A. Levine Books
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