HANDELLA

by Robert Tallon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 1972

You can't deny the novelty but you may well question the necessity of TV artist Tallon's world, in which not only the dancer-heroine but her audience and all her acquaintances, as well as the trees, snake, crocodile and airplane that play a part in her story, are conceived as hands. That's right, hands -- with fingers functioning here as arms and legs, there as nose or mouth, and cartoonish faces sketched in somewhere up toward the wrists. The pictures are both crude and unsettling, the story -- of a dancer (Handella) who falls when she spins but becomes a great star after the famous (ringed and manicured) Madame Fingersnap advises her to use a third finger for balance -- is contrustingly ordinary, and the combination makes for a sort of incongruity that appears to us as neither resonantly surreal on the one hand nor gaily nonsensical on the other, but just sort of gratuitously grotesque.

Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1972

Categories: CHILDREN'S