It ends in a way I did not expect–the duck squeaking good night under the moon, with a hidden sound effect in the back cover. For me, a Carle book with an ending I didn’t see coming a mile away, that’s a good night treat on a day when I needed it.ġ0 Little Rubber Ducks, by Eric Carle is available at your local bookstore.Hmmmm….so this really isn’t an environmental book when you pick it up but it made me think a lot about products that we use regularly that will take years and years to break down, and even then the compounds they were made up of will still exist – changing the soil or water they break down in forever.ġ0 little rubber ducks is a sweet book as many of Eric Carle’s books are.

Somehow, though, this book took me out of that rut in a way nothing else had. After that, a hectic run to Brooklyn to retrieve Tune and Monk from Auntie Meg, S and I missed swim class, stumbled through dinner and bath, and felt ourselves like bath toys adrift in a heartless sea. It was a day where that feeling resonated, one of the longest away from the kids since I started taking care of both of them, seeing about some interpreting work I might do down the road.

What nobody seems to notice is that the duck does not actually respond when quacked at. Whales, dolphins, seals behind it, the duck is accepted immediately by the quacking cohort. And that tenth duck floats his way into a duck family. But as we count, and learn vocabulary for animals (as in Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth) the ducks float. We count–because this is Eric Carle’s world, where the narrator has to count, tell time, present the days of the week, because the person reading the book needs to be told to do that, constrained into it by the very text of the story they are reading. (Astros-Phillies, as if ‘spring training’ didn’t diminish its significance enough.)Ī storm knocks one box into the water, and the ducks float. A promising opening–I turned down the noise of spring training baseball. In a factory, ducks are made, packed ten to a box, and shipped by truck and boat all over the world. Half-listening to story time while washing dishes tonight, I heard the beginnings of this book. The artless prose, the almost intentional lack of surprise in books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Grouchy Ladybug make me think of what poet friends of mine complain about with Billy Collins–a kind of paint-by-number approach, where the reader finishes with the illusion of an experience, the mirage of insight, not the thing itself. The art is pleasing enough, but the stories, too often, are just weak.

We aren’t a real big Eric Carle household. I have said it before in this space but it bears repeating.

Ten rubber duckies book