
(Though I would argue that an overreliance on illustrations might signal too little confidence in children’s imagination and in the strength of the text. On the whole, the illustrations may make the books seem less frightening to a young reader, but they don’t for me add anything to the plot or to my understanding of the story.


Cover yoda professional#
I don’t know which illustrations are Angleberger’s and which are Rosenstock’s, but I suspect that the more professional illustrations are Rosenstock’s, so I applaud Angleberger accepting some help, but maybe he didn’t accept enough or was overenthusiastic about having illustrations at all. Angleberger accepts help from Jason Rosenstock with whom he has co-illustrated the book. Kinney’s books also sell enormously well, and I have to wonder if the similarities between the two illustration styles contribute to Angleberger’s success.Ī few quick notes: I will be the first to admit that trying to capture the essence of my characters in drawings is one of the hardest things, but I recognize that I am not a professional artist and plan on accepting help-or foregoing illustrations more likely. In their loose, sketchy style, the illustrations remind me of those that I’ve seen on Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, though Kinney’s are somehow both better at conveying emotion and more cartoonish. If there had been less acknowledgement of its form within the texts, if the characters hadn’t kept referring to the book and complaining about being asked to write in it, I would have been less thrown from the novel with each new chapter.Įach report is headed by a drawing of the POV character. The text and format of the book as collected narratives, however, do make it disjointed, and that I think is what keeps it from shining for me. Several different fonts are used to distinguish the characters, though some characters share fonts, and all of the fonts are similar enough in style for the font changes themselves to not interfere with the flow of the novel as a whole. The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is written as if by a number of different characters reporting on encounters with one character, Dwight, and his finger puppet, Yoda. So take my review with those things in mind. By the time that I left for the signing, I was so far into the book that I couldn’t very well stop. I hurried through it, reading nearly half of it in two hours before leaving for the supposed signing. It sat unread on my shelves until I thought that I’d be able unexpectedly to see Angleberger. I found a copy of Tom Angleberger’s The Strange Case of Origami Yoda used some time ago, and recognizing that it sold well and was therefore probably something that I should read, I took it home.
