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HONEY BADGERS by Jamison Odone

HONEY BADGERS

by Jamison Odone & illustrated by Jamison Odone

Pub Date: April 1st, 2007
ISBN: 1-932425-51-9
Publisher: Front Street/Boyds Mills

Wearing influences from Maurice Sendak to Edward Gorey on his sleeve, Odone debuts with a child’s terse, surreal self-introduction. Found in a basket and raised by a pair of honey badgers—dressed, in the delicately drawn illustrations, in cable-knit, cold weather gear—a human child notes, among similar random observations, that his parents dine on snakes but he only eats flowers, that his father makes wonderful kites from ferns, and that while some claim that living in a den is absurd, what’s really absurd is that a friend lives with a couple of “creeping beetles.” He then announces that he’s going to bed. His free-ranging, outdoorsy lifestyle, along with the carved stone animals, rumpled-looking trees and other odd details tucked into the pictures, may engage readers for a bit, but most will just scratch their heads and move on. (Picture book. 6-8)