Sneetches, Zax, Daves and Pants. (The Sneetches and other stories - Dr Seuss)

Name: Kukana

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Product:	The Sneetches and other stories - Dr Seuss
Date:	26/01/04 (1198 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: gentle humour and clever rhymes, some useful underlying messages, great for reading aloud to children

Disadvantages: some messages not quite appropriate to small children

Adults, it seems, either love Dr Seuss's books or hate them. But most small children seem to enjoy his work at some level - if only for the strange, sometimes surreal cartoon-style pictures. Despite his popularity in the USA and UK over many decades, there is really nothing else comparable to the style of verse which Dr Seuss created. I particularly enjoy his cleverly invented words which not only fit neatly into the stories, but help beginner readers to enjoy word games and explore phonetic patterns.

'The Sneetches and other stories' is a children's book with four stories in typical Dr Seuss rhyming verse. The first story (The Sneetches) is fairly long, as is the final story; the middle two are much shorter. I always found this more suitable as a read-aloud book than a beginner-reader book, since some of the language is fairly complex. I read this to my sister occasionally when she was about five or six; I read it to my sons when they were around the same age, and a few months ago I read it as a bedtime story to my nephew, who was just eight. He reads far more complex books to himself, but still considers this to be one of his favourites to listen to.

~~~ The Sneetches

As with many of the longer Seuss books, each story has a moral which can be understood at different levels. The Sneetches is a delightful story of some tall yellow creatures who live on the beaches (after all, what else rhymes with Sneetches?!) and are in the throes of some terrible apartheid. This is because, as the story starts, 'The star-belly Sneetches have bellies with stars; the plain-belly Sneetches have none upon thars'. The star-belly Sneetches consider themselves vastly superior to the plain-belly sneetches. The star-bellies have barbecues and play games, and generally enjoy life, while the plain-bellies sit and watch
sadly, with no hope of being included.

Then one day, along comes Sylvester McMonkey McBean, a friendly-looking businessman with a strange machine who offers to put stars on the plain-belly Sneetches to make them look just the same as the star-bellies. Naturally the plain-bellies queue up and pay their money, and then show off their stars proudly... at which point the original star-bellies get very worried. So Sylvester McMonkey McBean produces his second machine, which will remove stars, and the star-bellies queue up for that, claiming that now it's not cool to have stars at all!

From this point chaos ensues, although eventually there's a happy conclusion.

I find that even quite small children absorb the message about equality, and not judging people by their looks; as such I consider this one of the best of Dr Seuss's stories. Gentle fun is poked at the Sneetches for their determination to be better than the others, and the ending is very satisfactory. As an adult I find myself rather frustrated with the plain-belly Sneetches at the beginning, sitting around moping when they could well have got up their own picnics and parties etc; I also wonder why every one of them followed the others like sheep in and out of the machines, rather than realising what was going to happen. But this is the cynicism of adulthood, and I can still appreciate the underlying message of the need for acceptance and equality, and of not taking any notice of how people look.


~~~ The Zax

The second story in the book is only a few pages long, telling the story of two stubborn Zax, small creatures who apparently spend their lives with one single-minded goal. One of them is a North-going Zax, the other a South-going Zax. Unfortunately they meet face-to-face, and neither will budge. They are so determined to stick to what they'd learned, that they both refuse to take even the tiniest of steps
to East or West - and end up spending their days staring at each other angrily, while life goes on around them and new highways are built over them.

This story doesn't have the depth of the Sneetches, and is perhaps a rather ludicrous look at the potential result of extreme stubbornness. I'm not sure that small children really understand what it's about, and simply enjoy the story for the humour. Nevertheless, I have to admit (as a rather stubborn person) that I've had the Zax story flash into my mind a few times in my life, when I was about to embark on a particular path that left little room for adaptation in the future. If nothing else, it helped to teach me flexibility and the need to make changes to plans when they prove unhelpful.


~~~ The Daves

'Did I ever tell you of Mrs McCave, who had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?' - this story is quite short, and is nothing more than an example of Dr Seuss's cleverly invented names and rhymes. Mrs McCave regrets her naming policy, although she seems to have very well-behaved sons: any time she wants one of them, and calls 'Dave', all twenty-three arrive eagerly to find out what she wants. The last page is devoted to the names she wishes she'd called them, a list of the most unlikely names (Marvin O'Gravel Balloonface is my favourite) which could be quite challenging to a beginner reader but which roll off the tongue nicely when read aloud. The moral is presumably not to call all your children by the same name, but this is hardly something that's going to apply to most people!


~~~ What was I scared of?

This is the final story of the book, and almost as long as The Sneetches. This looks at a child's fears, in particular unknown fears in the dark. 'I was walking in the woods, and I saw nothing scary,' the story begins, 'For I have never been afraid of anything. Not vairy.'
On this note of uncertainty, we're plunged straight into the appearance of something which terrifies the narrator: 'a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them'. Pants, of course, is the American word for trousers, and the pictures show clearly a pair of pale green long trousers, filled perhaps with somebody invisible. The idea is designed to poke a little humour at fears of the unknown - and succeeds even better than Seuss planned with young British children, for whom 'pants' are a kind of underwear, and considered slightly risqué to talk about!

The story follows the narrator as he becomes more and more panic-stricken by these 'pale green pants' which appear any time he goes into the woods, and even seem to start stalking him in other places. Frightening indeed, until one day he realises that the pants are actually scared of him too. From this discovery, they manage to make friends and the fear is conquered.

While I think this story works in terms of helping a child conquer irrational fears, it does strike me as a little worrying, from the point of view of making friends in this way. In today's world a child probably does well to be afraid of someone who keeps appearing and staring at him. While nobody should spend their lives in blind terror, a little healthy caution is not necessarily a bad thing.

However this, and other issues, can be discussed by parent and child together - a good reason for reading these aloud, helping young children see the underlying truths of these unlikely stories, the morals behind the humour, and also the cautions which should be made.


~~~ Conclusion

If you like Dr Seuss and haven't come across this book, I thoroughly recommend it. It's a book to read over and over, and appeals to people of all ages. I like the mixture of seriousness and fun, and the different 'lessons' that can be learned at different ages.

O
n the other hand if you don't like Seuss's style, or his made-up words and wacky drawings, you probably won't like this either.


~~~ Details

This book has about 64 pages of text, all of which are illustrated. It was re-published recently in paperback, and available from Amazon.co.uk and elsewhere for £4.99. The hardcover original, published in 1961, is sometimes available used from Amazon or from Abebooks.co.uk

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