THE MIAMI GIANT

Amid great pomp, Giuseppe Giaweeni left Italy to look for China." Instead, he discovered Miami, which is inhabited by "a lost tribe of dancing giants! The Mishbookers of Miami!" "Tutto Amazing!" says Giaweeni. Yorinks (Whitefish Will Rides Again!, 1994, etc.) and Sendak (We Are All In the Dumps With Jack and Guy, 1993, etc.) have thrown together Renaissance Italy, Jewish Miami Beach, and fin-de-siécle Paris (where Giaweeni—a Gulliver/Marco Polo type—takes one of the Mishbookers to show off as "the eighth wonder of the world), and peopled them with big and little characters with outrageous postures and facial expressions. The text, strewn with Italianisms and Yiddishisms, is distributed between the narrator (a sentence or two per page) and the characters (in speech-bubbles) in such a way that there is a constant back-and-forth between the two, each one using the other as a straight man. The result is a free-spirited burlesque. With its big text and big pictures, the book looks like an overstuffed suitcase, but it's obvious that nothing in it could have been left behind. It's a mish-mash to please both jolly giants and little people alike. (Picture book. 7-9)