Help Baby Walrus by Ilia Tversky
What's It About?
If your kids love silly little stories told in silly verse, they’re sure to giggle over Help Baby Walrus (Bumblebee Books) by Ilia Tversky. In it, we are treated to 15 tales about creatures both real and imagined, along with a few rather peculiar humans.From various bodies of water, we meet the yellow walrus, Minnie-muddle (our titular baby) who’s afraid of drowning in a puddle; a dancing pair of frogs named Frag and Frog who prank other animals in their bog; and a “lovely, slender crocodile” who lives by the Nile (of course) and likes to play chess with sheep, among other things.
From the skies comes Yvette, a strange bird from Brussels who has lots of gossip to share about the goings-on of the bird kingdom in that part of the world. She’s joined by some other avians — a pair of penguins and a pair of peacocks — each dreaming of what the other pair is enjoying in their very different climates on opposite sides of the world.
On land, we find a whole string of donkeys in a relay that runs from the meadow, through the edge of town and across the river. There’s the helpful gentlemanly giraffe Zharmen, who feeds treats to kids and helps them get to things they can’t reach themselves. Domestic creatures get their moments, too. Margarita the Rat and Dasha the Cat are neighbors who are both learning English, unbeknownst to each other. There’s also the peppy Doggie Lisik, who belongs to the family of a child named David, a little boy who recurs throughout the book in several of the tales.
As Tversky explains in his foreword, “This book includes children’s poems written for my son, David. … The heroes of the poems are real and fictional toys, animals, and unusual creatures that accompanied David throughout his joyful childhood, and now, I hope, will become friends of many children.”
We meet some mixed animal pairs as well, such as Batzbanik the bunny and Daphne the duckling, basketball buddies who love practicing together with a menagerie of taller animals. But the most wonderful tale of all creatures belongs to the hedgehog, who gives away every last quill to his friends so they can sew their outfits: “To knit a scarf for a deer, a cap for an eel, / Mittens for hares, a beret for a seal. / A squirrelly sweater and a piggy vest, / Warm woollen pants that fit a sick tiger best!”
Some of the more bizarre creatures include a two-faced boy whose name flip-flops between Chudo-Yudo and Yudo-Chudo, depending on the face that’s dominating at the moment; a “Strange Little Animal” who unleashes havoc in a sick little boy’s home; a brave band of “acorn soldiers,” and four very different elf-like Chuki-Buruki who enter a home and soon become part of the family.
The verses are accompanied by plentiful, imaginative and colorful illustrations that really do a great job at bringing out the personalities of each of the creature characters in the stories. Remarkably, the verses were not originally written in English; they originated in Russian. Tversky employed the help of a translator, Jon Davis, to bring them across the language divide, a process that requires an extra level of writing skill, given that these are rhyming poems.
While we can’t vouch for the Russian version (at least, not until we’ve done some more Duolingo lessons), the English edition of Help Baby Walrus is the kind of book you and your kids will return to time and again, sharing the kind of silliness that makes bedtime routines a fun end-of-day ritual and fueling little imaginations with the secret lives of critters from across the world.
