Carle's Ladybug Has Flown Into Our Hearts

The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle

I refuse to read this book to my son.

We checked it out of the library because I have been impressed with Eric Carle. We got it home and I read it after my son went to bed. It has all of the wonderful artwork that appears in his other books--large swatches of watercolor creating creatures with lots of visual character.

The story starts out at night with the fireflies dancing around the moon. The type is pretty tiny in the hardcover book that we got from the library, but that's hardly a problem. It leaves more room for the wonderful illustrations and since my son is too young to read for himself, he's not the one who will have to decipher the small print.

The sun comes up at 5 a.m. and two ladybugs land on a leaf with lots of aphids. There is a friendly ladybug and a grouchy ladybug. The friendly ladybug greets the other with a good morning. The grumpy ladybug tells the friendly one to go away. When it refuses, the grouchy ladybug challenges it to a fight. The friendly ladybug responds in a truly assertive fashion:

"If you insist," answered the friendly ladybug sweetly. It looked the other bug straight in the eye.

How wonderful! It doesn't get aggressive, it doesn't become passive, it simply stands up for itself and doesn't compromise its values at all. A fantastic example! The grouchy ladybug gets insecure in the face of such self-confident assertiveness and tells the friendly ladybug, "Oh, you're not big enough for me to fight." So the friendly one tells grumpy to go pick on somebody bigger.

Here's another thing I like about this book. Carle avoids using "he" or "she." All of the animals are "it." So none of the behaviors can be assigned a gender, another important factor when reading stories to impressionable young minds.

Anyway, the grouchy ladybug flies off and here's where the book gets really fun. Carle never limits himself to the traditional idea that pages must all be uniform sizes, uniform type, and solid pages. No, he uses everything available to tell his story. In The Very Hungry Caterpillar he puts holes in the pages as the caterpillar eats through the various foods. In this book, he emphasizes size with shortened pages and reduced type. The pages become a fan as the grumpy ladybug's challenge to the bee is done on a page less than an inch wide. The next challenge (to a stag beetle) is about a 1/4-inch wider. Each page with each challenge gets a little wider and the reader can see the sun rise with each page and then fall again until the grouchy ladybug is challenging a whale at 5 p.m. Also, the first encounter is described in very small type, perhaps 8 point, possibly 7. With each encounter, the type gets a little bigger.

According to the little clocks at the top of the page, it takes the grouchy ladybug 45 minutes to fly the length of the whale, only to be smacked by the tail and knocked all the way back to the original leaf with the friendly ladybug. It responds:

"Ah, here you are again," said the friendly ladybug. "You must be hungry. There are still some aphids left. You can have them for dinner."

"Oh, thank you," said the wet, tired, and hungry ladybug.

They ate the aphids, the leaf thanked them, and they went to sleep as once again the fireflies came out to dance around the moon.

It's a wonderful illustration of so many things: a little botany, a little zoology, and a lot of self-esteem and assertiveness examples. The back of the book says it explores the concepts of "time, size, shapes, and manners." I especially like that the friendly ladybug never once gloated or even brought up the earlier challenge.

So why won't I read this book to my son? The day after I read this, we took it in the car as we ran some errands. He began looking through it. Soon, he was busily narrating the story. I caught the words ladybug and elephant, but couldn't quite make out the rest. For the next half hour, he went backward and forward through the book. For the next two weeks, every time we got into the car, he would chatter away, telling the story as he believed it to be.

I just don't have the heart to interfere with his creative imagination and spoil something he enjoys so much with something as mundane as the words Carle chose to put there. I think Carle would approve.