OOPS!

A mad dash through Paris to catch a plane involves a family in the most improbable adventures ever imagined. Aunt Roberta slips on the soap, their taxi driver swerves to avoid the mailman, there are huge traffic jams all around and the subway suspends service. They try bikes, running through sewers and using every available conveyance, but of course they miss the plane. Some accommodating extraterrestrials return a bar of soap, cryptically mention cause-and-effect relationships and offer their spaceship in lieu of the missed plane. The text provides no further explanation for this lunacy, and the mayhem is made even more bizarre in Jolivet’s bright, busy illustrations filled with frantic energy. There are bears, bee swarms, pink water in the Seine, clowns, motorcades, parachutes, fireworks, helicopters and lots of other oddities on the oversized pages. The “chain of catastrophes” is explained on the last foldout page with a numbered key to the events (unfortunately in tiny, light-gray print). But young readers will pore over the pages, laugh out loud and just enjoy. Fun for anyone willing to surrender to the looniness. (Picture book. 5-10)