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A review by michaelstearns
A Room With a Zoo by Jules Feiffer
2.0
My love of A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears and The Man in the Ceiling is such that I doubt Feiffer could have done anything but disappoint.
Yet even with that caveat, there is something about this book that feels smaller than its conceit. The story is a first-person tale of Julie and her many pets, clearly the adopted child of Jules Feiffer. Julie is a classic comic narrator, one who understands less than does the reader, and so we laugh at her fumbled attempts to fix things. Mostly this works, but other times there is a faint whiff of the adult to the proceedings, a bit of condescension towards Julie that I think most kid readers will miss entirely. Made me wonder who, exactly, the ideal reader for this novel is.
As usual with Feiffer, he ends the book beautifully. But that isn't enough to make up for the other problems I've got with this.
Yet even with that caveat, there is something about this book that feels smaller than its conceit. The story is a first-person tale of Julie and her many pets, clearly the adopted child of Jules Feiffer. Julie is a classic comic narrator, one who understands less than does the reader, and so we laugh at her fumbled attempts to fix things. Mostly this works, but other times there is a faint whiff of the adult to the proceedings, a bit of condescension towards Julie that I think most kid readers will miss entirely. Made me wonder who, exactly, the ideal reader for this novel is.
As usual with Feiffer, he ends the book beautifully. But that isn't enough to make up for the other problems I've got with this.