Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Zeralda’s Ogre by Tomi Ungerer

No stranger to controversy, we dive deep into one of Tomi Ungerer’s more peculiar picture books. It’s all about the consumption of children, but that’s not why we get icked out by this particular title. Turns out, it has an ending grosser than anything involving the consumption of kids. Sadly, I was not able to give Kate the blood and guts in a picture book that she so desperately required. In my defense, I remembered a lot more bloody knives than we see on these pages. Certainly Ungerer was happy to place blood in some of his other stories, but this particular time the violence was more implied than anything else. In this episode we discuss food, food, and more food (guess we were hungry).

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Show Notes:

I highly recommend that you read The Virginia Quarterly Review piece The Beastly Boy: Tomi Ungerer and the Art of Provocation by Lisa Brown about Tomi Ungerer and his life.

Last week I called out Kirkus for its egregious review of Skippyjon Jones, so this week I’d like to praise them for their review of Zeralda’s Ogre. Some hightlights:

• “In an anti-climax, Zeralda, now grown to beautiful maidenhood, is wooed and wed by the ogre.”
• “The illustrative style alternates between inflated ugliness in orange, black, bisque (as per Orlando, the Brave Vulture) and multicolor peasant picturesqueness (last spring’s The Donkey Ride), sometimes with good effect for the story, sometimes gratuitously—but children will drool over the double-page spread of delicacies, a kind of gemutlich McCall’s.”
• “The beginning is authentic scare, the turnabout is fare play and good fun, the last is a letdown—it will repel some youngsters, probably attract more, but it’s not Ungerer at his best.”

For an interesting take on this book, please read Elizabeth Dreyfuss’s piece Ogre found in Medium and dating back to the early days of the pandemic. Sheltering in place has a lot to do with both this book and our early COVID days.

Kate is fairly certain that the ogre is, in fact, not all that big. He’s just a tall guy. What precisely makes you an “ogre” here?

The farmer claims that he’s sick because, “I must have eaten too many of your apple dumplings for lunch.” This is his poor excuse for sending his 6-year-old off to market to sell their annual crop. “He has to send his SIX-YEAR-OLD into an ogre-infested countryside by herself with all of their products to sell… well, she’s going to be haggling. So I hope he taught her THAT along with ‘how to braise’.”

Six-years-old, going on thirty.

Turns out this pig is right to be worried about where all this is going.

Kate was right. We should have made this one a Thanksgiving book.

And here’s where it all falls apart for us. It actually would have been in keeping with Ungerer’s style if all the ogres went right back to eating kids again at the end. Instead, it gets gross (in a different way) and Zeralda friggin’ marries the old ogre. Ew. The only possibly good part of this picture is the kid with the knife and fork in their hands looking at the baby. Too little, too late, Tomi.

Betsy Recommends: American Fiction

Kate Recommends: Showman’s Rest in Forest Park, Illinois

Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate