Dispatches from the 70s #3

The Accident Kids & Seeing Things

The Accident Kids, written by Richard G. Boyer & illustrated by Barbara Howell Furan

The 1974 School Library Journal review of The Accident Kids begins:

An idiotic safety primer, this tries to clobber kids with its message of “be careful.”

If a review STARTS with a line like that, OBVIOUSLY I’m going to get curious.

Some brief background on where I’m coming from here: When it comes to books and reading and opinions about literary quality, I have mellowed a LOT over the years. I’ve gotten very live-and-let-live—my taste is my taste, your taste is your taste, we’re all coming to stories looking for different things, and what I want in a book is not necessarily what someone else wants, etc., etc., etc. Theodore Boone is your fave kids book ever? That’s cool. It is not for me, but I will not rain on your parade about it, even if the idea of ME re-reading it makes me want my eyeballs to fall out.

So I went into this book thinking, “Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

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Book cover: The Accident Kids

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Friends, it’s that bad.

Really and truly.

I could write about it for the next two weeks and STILL not capture how absolutely terrible it is.

It’s hard to believe that it’s even REAL. It reads like a satirical take on a didactic picture book written by the folks at MAD Magazine and illustrated by the artists behind Garbage Pail Kids, except it is in earnest.

The About the Author explains that Richard G. Boyer “is Safety Consultant to many State Departments of Education throughout the country” and mentions that he is married and has three daughters, which was hugely surprising to me because while I was reading it, I assumed it was written by a person who had never met an actual child.

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Page 20 of The Accident Kids

What is the age demographic they’re shooting for here? I was a pretty (outwardly) sedate kid, and I feel like even my chill seven-year-old fingers would have been grasping for a switchblade if I’d had the misfortune to stumble across the words MIDDLE-DIDDLE in a book that was trying to teach me A Life Lesson.

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THE RHYMING, GUYS. OH GOD, THE HUMANITY, THE RHYMING:

Up to the closed door we trot. Too fast we run and can’t stop. Right through the door, and smash to the floor. Our noses are bent from this super-duper accident.

And then there’s this absolute madness:

Miss Strict, our teacher, has a fetish.

If we don’t walk, her face becomes reddish.

THEIR TEACHER HAS A FETISH.

AND IS NAMED MISS STRICT.

WHAT. IS. HAPPENING.

Note: Their bus driver is named, wait for it, Mr. Diver? I read and re-read that line like 15 times, wondering if it was a typo. Based on the rest of the book, I have come to the conclusion that it was not.

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The illustrations are bright and it’s fun to see the 1970s fashion on display, but like I said, love child of MAD and Garbage Pail Kids, and that’s without even drilling down into the shall-we-say QUESTIONABLE choices in re: depiction of the characters of color, particularly the Black ones:

Pages 10-11 from The Accident Kids, written by Richard G. Boyer and illustrated by Barbara Howell Furnan

The depiction of the kid lying on the floor on page eleven speaks for itself, but for real, how old is the kid in the corner with his back to us supposed to be? Forty? KIDS DON’T HAVE MUSCLES LIKE THAT, WHAT THE HELL. There are exactly two kids built like this in the book, and they are both Black. It’s a perfect example of the adultification of Black children, and it’s gross and yes, racist.

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Other titles covered in the September 1974 SLJ

The Laughing Garbage Disposal (about hyenas)
Nature’s Carpet Sweeper (about snails)
Nature’s Smallest Gravedigger (about burying beetles)

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Seeing Things, by Robert Froman

The SLJ review of this one ALSO starts off with a zinger, but in this case I think it’s unfair:

The 51 so-called poems in this mindless collection are actually word arrangements designed to represent objects, noises, natural phenomena, etc.

YES, YOU NERDS, YOU ARE DESCRIBING CONCRETE POETRY. WHICH IS A REAL THING THAT (according to Wikipedia) GOES ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE THIRD CENTURY BCE. *breathes into paper bag*

The review goes on to compare it to a book called Poems Make Pictures*, but gives that one a pass because, I kid you not, the pictures are in color.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed it? It won’t knock Paul Janeczko and Chris Raschka’s Kick in the Head or Poke in the I off my list of fave poetry collections—and OMG I had no idea (or had forgotten) that there was a third installment, I’ll have to get it ASAP!!—but MINDLESS is way harsher than it deserves.

*Yes, I’m going to look it up.

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My favorite one, hands down, is Weekend in the Country, because it perfectly depicts what it’s like here in Southern Maine on summer Sundays when we’re cheerfully driving north on 95 while what looks like the entire populations of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York are crabbily—and very very slowly—creeping home from their oceanfront houses. I paired it with Hot Enough to See because they’re both great examples of what most of these poems are—brief observations of the poet’s surroundings. Kind of like haiku, but about man-made objects and situations instead of nature:

There are also some FEELINGS ones, like Help!, which I think would have especially appealed to Tragic High School Leila; and lots like Vacant Plot that do focus on nature and animals (I like the extra ‘and’s in that one):

Will it (did it) light the world on fire? Doubtful.

Is it playful and clever and enjoyable? Yes.

Could it encourage readers—particularly reluctant ones, particularly those suspicious of or scared of or intimidated by Capital-P Poetry™—to indulge in some wordplay of their own? VERY POSSIBLY.

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