I received this book for free from the library in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Source: the library
McElligot's Pool
by
Dr. Seuss
It is part of the Marco series and is a picture book in Hardcover edition that was published by Random House for Young Readers on September 12, 1947 and has 64 pages.
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Other books in this series include [books_series]
Other books by this author which I have reviewed include Sneetches and Other Stories, Horton Hatches the Egg & Horton Hears a Who!, Green Eggs and Ham, The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, The Lorax, Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, Daisy-Head Mayzie, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, The King's Stilts, Scrambled Eggs Super!, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories, You're Only Old Once!, My Many Colored Days, If I Ran the Circus, Sleep Book, I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! and Other Stories, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
This story comes after And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street and revolves around the amazingly imaginative Marco.
In 1950, McElligot’s Pool won the Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader’s Choice Award, and in 1948, it won the Caldecott Honor.
My Take
I had barely started before I knew the graphics would be such a very Seuss-ian delight, *grin*
The odd thing, though, is that the color graphics alternate with the gray-and-white ones, and I don’t understand why. I did love the one with the “flexible” strut holding up a whale of an outcropping of land on which sits the town, LOL.
It does make for an interesting contrast between the wise, all-knowing farmer who warns Marco he’ll never catch a fish in this solitary pool, and the imaginative enthusiasm Marco shows. It also provides Seuss with the opportunity to provide a geological lesson as well as one on the denizens of the sea. And lots of opportunities for Mom and the kids to exercise their own imaginations. Lord knows, Seuss was amazingly creative with the kinds of fish Marco thinks might be catchable.
Brilliantly done with its own reality.
The Story
Young Marco may find a fish here in McElligot’s Pool despite what any old farmer might say.
The Characters
Marco is a young boy with an imagination and a farmer.
Oh, yeah, and lots and lots and lots of fish.
The Cover and Title
The background for the cover is an elliptical swirl of blues and grays as an orange and green fish greedily eyes a worm on a hook that’s attached to a bobber floating in the water. The title and author’s name is in a soft fuchsia with the title outlined in black.
The title could possibly be a portal to the sea, oh, yes, who knows how far McElligot’s Pool may flee.
