THE NAKED STREAK

A one-kid protest against oppressive attire—actually, make that any attire.

“On Monday it was decided there would be no more hats. On Tuesday it was decided there would be no more coats.” On it goes until the willful young child at this giddy-making story’s center is barreling around, indoors and out, in nary a stitch of clothing. The kid’s parents, who, like the youngster, appear to be of Asian ancestry, plead and negotiate without achieving the desired result: a non-naked child. But what’s this? A glimpse at an older sister’s fabulous fashions is all it takes for the little nudist to appreciate the expressive potential of apparel—at least for an hour or so. What makes this you-do-you story so wonderfully audacious is that its heart is clearly with the carousing child rather than with the killjoy parents. Part of the book’s humor is the contradiction between the even-keeled omniscient narration—“And so it was decided that maybe some clothes were okay after all. But then again…maybe not”—and the kinetic-frenetic illustrations of a buck-naked child on a rampage. Observant young readers will get a kick out of how Kim, working in secondary-color-heavy digitized watercolors, makes a sport of cleverly obscuring all of the kid’s NSFW body parts—with a cereal box at the grocery store and a placed-just-so cup during an imaginary tea party.

An unremittingly funny ode to young children’s lack of inhibition.