A departure from her “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” series, Laura Joffe Numeroff gives us “Chimps Don’t Wear Glasses,” an imaginative look into the animal world and how it relates to us as humans, encouraging the reader to let loose and be creative. I’ve found frequently in my explorations into children’s picture books that the illustrations surpass the text, and that is certainly true in this case. The illustrations are fantastic.
We begin with a picture of a chimp rock band, all dressed to the teeth (some looking remarkably like Elton John) and the words, “Chimps don’t wear glasses.” Then we see a zebra, wearing a chef’s hat, stirring up something messy in a pot over the stove, while the kangaroo, similarly attired, tries to figure it all out in a cookbook, dangerously dangling a container of cayenne pepper over the pot. We’re told that zebras don’t cook and kangaroos don’t read.
We then encounter hang-gliding horses, giraffes driving cars and going through a toll booth run by a pig, Boy Scout mice, window shopping llamas, hamster janitors, square dancing reindeer, and tourist weasels having their picture taken in front of Mt. Rushmore.
We also see pole-vaulting pandas, an operatic camel, and a dazzling figure-skating tiger. As we go through this world of fantasy, reading about all the things animals don’t do, we come to the final pages, which tell us that if we just use our imaginations, who knows what we’ll come up with?
You will want to look at this book just to see the pictures. Joe Mathieu was the illustrator, and he puts so much humor into his work. The facial expressions on the llama and the camel are absolutely priceless, all dolled up with lipstick and eyeshadow, like they are. You might enjoy this book even more than your children do!
A companion volume to this is “Dogs Don’t Wear Sneakers.”
(This book was published in 1995 by Simon and Schuster.)
Related Blogs:
The Picture Books of Laura Joffe Numeroff
Children’s Picture Books by Kathy Mallat
The Children’s Picture Books of Margie Palatini