Crazy Cousins
‘Dozens of Cousins’ and ‘Cousin Irv From Mars’
From "Dozens of Cousins"
By SARAH HARRISON SMITH
Published: July 3, 2013
According to Tolstoy, cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood, and if
you’ve ever had a small horde of somewhat-related kids over to your
house you may find you agree. As two new picture books demonstrate,
cousins may be surprisingly different, but they tend to share a common
sense of fun, and things can get wild fast.
DOZENS OF COUSINS
Written by Shutta Crum
Illustrated by David Catrow
32 pp. Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)
COUSIN IRV FROM MARS
Written and illustrated by Bruce Eric Kaplan
40 pp. Simon & Schuster. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)
In “Dozens of Cousins,” Shutta Crum’s warm, lyrical prose poem summons
up the joy of an exuberant band of kinfolk who gather at a family
reunion. There are so many cousins, none of them are ever named.
Instead, the children refer to themselves as the “beasties,” and they do
seem as much like puppies as little humans. “We are wild and fierce, /
We do not wait for invitations. / We run through front doors, arms
extended, /slap dirty feet on cool linoleum, / grab from plates thrust
out at us — and holler for more.”
The cousins’ naughtiness is clearly infectious. All but the oldest big
brothers and sisters join in the frolic. David Catrow’s illustrations
convey giddy, chaotic action: while a collection of every-colored
grown-ups chat at a picnic table, a baby howls on a blanket, a boy with a
Mohawk runs with his tongue out and a terrier skids to a halt at the
sight of three preschoolers overcome by giggles as they shake their
fannies at distracted elders.
Night falls and the scene quiets: “When some have left for home, / we
are carried inside and sleep curled / amid arms and legs on pallets on
the floor — / our grubby beastie toes pointing up at the big open grin
of the moon.” You can practically hear the adults — and maybe a few of
the younger set — sigh with relief. If your household is about to be
invaded by a madcap throng of children, or if having waved them goodbye,
you want to think back on their antics, “Dozens of Cousins” might be
just the right read-aloud.
Of course, not every visit from a cousin is quite so much fun. At the
start of “Cousin Irv From Mars,” young Teddy, who generally hides in the
closet when his relatives come over, is a little wary of his visiting
Cousin Irv. The problem is not that Irv’s an alien — it’s that he’s a
bit of a pain. He hogs the bathroom, eats everything in sight and plays
annoying music. Teddy’s parents aren’t terribly sympathetic. When he
asks when Cousin Irv is going to go home, his mother “told him people
needed to get along with their distant cousins from Mars.”
When Irv accompanies Teddy to school, Irv’s alienness is suddenly a
social asset. None of Teddy’s friends have ever met anyone from Mars
before, and Irv entertains the students by using his electromagnetic ray
to vaporize “a few things in the classroom.” A teacher looks on; she is
not amused. And so things begin to improve, as Irv becomes a friend to
Teddy, happy to read him the same book 14 times in a row and
delightfully unaware of silly grown-up rules, like the one about not
eating pizza in the bathtub.
Bruce Eric Kaplan’s illustrations here have a similar tone to his
cartoons for The New Yorker. His pictures are static but convey humor
and oddness through his characters’ exaggerated stances. His text is
funny too, as the story, told from Teddy’s perspective, includes
platitudes you can imagine he has heard directly from adults. “Teddy’s
family was sad but had to accept that Cousin Irv was leaving, because we
all know, or should know if we weren’t always forgetting, accepting
things is the only way to be happy.” Are all cousins from Mars? In a
way, perhaps they are, and that is where the fun begins.