So you have a mouse, a jackass, and a monkey. No, this isn’t the beginning of a joke. You can say it’s slapstick humor of the juvenile kind but witty enough for adults to enjoy. But you have three guesses which one doesn’t know what a book is.
We find Monkey reclined in a chair reading a (gasp) BOOK. It’s not a digital reader, but a hardcore, hardcover, paper-in-the-middle book. Jackass relentlessly drills Monkey about it. “Can it text?” … “Blog?” … “Scroll?” … “Wi-Fi?” As a stoic Monkey merely repeats, “No, it’s a book.”
As Monkey hands Jackass the book, the mule mulls over the pages and declares there are “too many letters.” But his hyper-questioning is soon transformed into a still fixation over the story for hours. Cleverly, the tale is “Treasure Island,” and Jackass is immersed in the loot he has uncovered. And in the end, it is Mouse who has the final word.
We are bombarded with a plethora of gizmos in this technologically-driven world. This witty children’s book reminds us there are some things that cannot be replaced by what we find in our gadget nooks. However, as this celebrates the simplicity of a book, it does introduce children to vocabularies that, obviously, they will come to learn. As this could be deemed as a modern fable to suit our information age, we could surmise the moral: there is no substitute for a good book.
