The Philippine Online Chronicles

In my reviews, I tend to build up toward a synthesizing statement at the end of the piece, but I'd like to get this out of the way first: Bullysaurus Rex (written and illustrated by Robert Magnuson and published by Hiyas) is a great book for children. The story contains a moral lesson but doesn't bludgeon you over the head with it, and Robert Magnuson has some of the most engaging and charming art I've ever seen in a locally published children's book. I make this unvarnished recommendation now, because I wouldn't want my dissection of the book, what works and what doesn't, to obscure the fact that this book comes highly recommended as a book for children. (Plus, it has dinosaurs!)

Bullysaurus Rex ("a fun, fearful tale from log ago" says the cover) is a fully illustrated (and full color), children's book with a twenty-nine page story and a two page "Anti-Bully Cryptogram Code-Breaker".  It tells the story of how Tyrannosaurus Rex, a young dinosaur fond of scaring his friends silly, learns what it means to be afraid and how to be a better friend, with a little bit of dental hygiene know-how thrown in for good measure.

Now, the title is a bit misleading, in that Tyrannosaurus Rex isn't really a bully in the story. Instead, he's the kind of rambunctious, mischievous, pilyo child that all of us have experience with in one form or another, the one who just wants to have a good time and doesn't know when to stop because he just doesn't realize he's hurting or irritating other people. Bullies tend to derive pleasure from the feeling of control over other people--they know perfectly well that what they're doing either hurts or scares other people, and they're fine with that. Tyrannosaurus Rex, however, thinks his scary roar routine is hilarious because he doesn't know what it means to be scared. So this story isn't so much about how to deal with a bully as it is about how it is important to put yourself in other people's shoes. Of course, teaching a bully empathy would likely put a stop to his bullying, but a bully would be unlikely to simply go along gamely with the suggestions of his victims, as Tyrannosaurus Rex does here. (However, the "Anti-Bully Cryptogram Code-Breaker" portion does contain some tips from Hiyas about how to deal with real life bullies once you unscramble the letters--and, yes, children may pick up on the "bullying is bad" lesson anyway, as this review by an eleven year old shows.)

What is good, for me, about how the story imparts its lesson is the fact that it doesn't place the emphasis on "morality" but on learning, on knowledge. The story doesn't set out to paint Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad light, or portray his actions as sinful, or overburden him with guilt. He acted the way he acted because of ignorance, and the cure for this was knowledge, because knowing what fear was like made Tyrannosaurus Rex stop thinking it was fun to cause fear in his friends. I like that Magnuson, even if it's aimed at children, doesn't feel the need to spell out the reason why Tyrannosaurus Rex stopped roaring at his friends. Children will be smart enough to figure it out, and it seems that Magnuson both knows and respects his audience--another indication of this is the fact that the narrative isn't completely linear, Tyrannosaurus Rex's friends solving their problem and teaching him fear, but not in the manner they had originally planned (in a book that held a lesser regard for the intelligence of children, the original plan would simply have worked, and all would have been resolved). It's clear that, even though the book has a simple plot, thought and care went into designing its different elements. The way Magnuson links the definition of fear to the imagination (in this case, the escalating scenarios that Tyrannosaurus Rex imagines after he learns he has a cavite) is something I didn't expect to find in a children's book,  going beyond the mere physical manifestations of fear (sweaty palms, rapid heart beat, and the like). And of course, there's something very fitting in the fact that Tyrannosaurus Rex meets his match (in a way) when confronted by… Dentistsaurus! (Although, parents, do take the time to explain that isn't an actual dinosaur--if children today are like children in my youth, misnaming a dinosaur can be a major social faux pas.)

Still, Bullysaurus Rex is a children's book. Children's books, especially illustrated children's books, are meant to be read aloud. This requires that the good children's book author maintains a certain rhythm to the sentence structure, a certain beat. Despite a few awkward turns of phrase and bits of syntax here and there, Bullysaurus Rex remains a story that can be read aloud to good effect, although it never quite falls into the sort of rhythm that characterizes more hypnotic works of children's fiction. The book, however, does try to make itself easier to read aloud by the inclusion of dialogue tags--but, while the tags do achieve that end, I feel that Bullysaurus Rex would be better off without them.

Bullysaurus Rex is a fully illustrated book, but you'll not I never said it was a "picture book"--instead, it is something of a hybrid, the traditional full page artwork with explanatory text mixed in with comic book style panels and speech balloons. It's a feature that has been praised by Gerry Alanguilan, and rightly so, for the two styles blend rather well. However, it's jarring to see dialogue tags ("Bee explained" or "Rex drooled") used in conjunction with speech bubbles (which already indicate who is talking) and artwork (which can already show how the character is saying a particular bit of dialogue). It also doesn't help that this mechanism isn't uniformly applied throughout the story--sometimes there are tags, other times there aren't.

Still, the tags aren't really a big issue--I'm not sure if I would have even noticed them if not for the fact that they were getting in the way of my enjoyment of Magnuson's wonderful art. Magnuson appears to have an art style particularly suited to children's books, with expressive faces (even if they're dinosaur faces!), dynamic composition, and highly amusing visual antics (such as when Triceratops is so startled by Tyrannosaurus Rex 's roar that she gets her horns stuck on an overhanging tree branch). I mentioned at the start of the review that the art was some of the best I've seen from a locally published children's book, and I stand by that statement--many locally published books seem to believe that art for children's books must consist of either drawings that look like they were actually made by children, or heavily stylized (almost abstract) images. Magnuson shows how important it is to have art with character, images that pop off the page with a sense of fun. Well done.

While I bought Bullysaurus Rex at the Komikon, you can purchase it at the OMF Site for PHP65.00. Oh, and it might be part of their ongoing June sale.

[Image source: OMF Lit.com page for Bullysaurus Rex. Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]