The art was my favorite thing about Mokie & Bik (which I wrote about here)—it was crisp and fleshed out. In this book, the art (some of which you can see on Jonathan Bean’s website) is in pencil rather than pen, and it’s sketchy, looser. Sometimes this works for me—I love the opening spread, with the looming hulls of ships and the twins’ neighbor, Erik, and his fishing boat and his cat—but sometimes it just feels unfinished. Bean does still admirably capture the motion of the twins and their surroundings: landing seabirds, lapping waves, leapfrogging kids, a running puppy. And I do quite like the softness in this image: the water and the smoke and the moon and the foliage at the left.
As with the last book, the text was secondary for me, though I did find it funnier and more charming in this one, with passages like this, when Mokie and Bik’s puppy falls overboard:
Waggles had black curly hair and big black paddly paws to help him swim. When he grew up he was going to be a swimming, rescuing Newfoundland dog. But right now he was a soggy shaggy round black waggles, and he knew how to swim but he didn’t know which way to go. (8-9)
Or this whole page, when Bik and Mokie are playing at getting Bullfrog ready to go to sea. And it’s fun to read about Mokie and Bik’s adventures, which include (unintentionally) taking Bullfrog to the fuel barge at the edge of the harbor by themselves, and fun for me to remember nautical vocabulary I haven’t thought about in years (like the spring line: that’s the rope holding the middle of the boat to the dock). Waggles the puppy and Laddie the dog kind of steal the show sometimes, and are totally great: there’s one drawing of a sheepish-looking Waggles holding a bumper (which is supposed to be hanging from the boat’s side/keeping it from bashing against the dock) that just slays me with its cuteness, and another of Laddie with Slow, the pet “tortle,” that’s also ridiculously sweet.
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