Dory Fantasmagory
The real world can really get in the way of the imaginary one.
Hi all, remember how I said which series I was probably going to do this week in last week’s newsletter? No? Good, neither do I.
This is a fun one, which we’ve read multiple times at Leo’s request.
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Now onto,
The Series: Dory Fantasmagory
The author and illustrator: Abby Hanlon
The pictures are ink drawings, and feel a little like a kid’s version of a New Yorker cartoon.
Length/picture density: 150-200 pages, with illustrations all over the place. Reading time is closer to a chapter book half the length of these. There are five books in the series. Also, apparently a musical currently running at New York City Children’s Theater.
The premise: Dory is a Kindergarten-aged kid with a very active imagination. Her imaginary friends and enemies are as prominent in the book as any of the other real characters, namely her siblings, best friends, and parents.
In each book, Dory faces an anxiety producing moment of childhood, like the first day of school, or learning to read, and she processes it through a parallel plot in her imagination world involving her monster best friend Mary and her enemy Mrs. Gobble Gracker who wants Dory to be a baby forever (which is Dory processing her unattainable desire into a bad guy -- heady stuff!).
The review: This kind of mixture of real and imaginary is hard to pull off, but these books do it masterfully. The imaginary characters and situations are fun and vivid without being cliche or patronizing, and there’s none of the “but wait! Someone left a feather on my windowsill so fairies are real after all!”
Dory’s friends and family are incredibly well realized, so that you don’t need to get through three scenes with them before you have a sense of who they are. Her siblings and parents all show a lot of love and frustration toward Dory, in a way that feels true to life with a young kid who is both a charming lunatic and legitimately difficult to handle.
Dory shares certain traits with Junie B. Jones and Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes in that she’s a kid full of wild thoughts and fantasies with a strong desire to live inside them. The imaginary worlds are both more fun and comfortable than the real one – you make the rules and control the narrative in them. A lot of growing up is dealing with how the real world intrudes on your imaginary one (or at least constructing a mental model of the world that works well enough with the real one). In Dory’s fantasy, she can be powerful or she can be captured by Mrs. Gobble Gracker, who wants nothing more than for Dory to never grow up, so either way it’s a form of wish fulfillment.
What makes these books about more than Dory’s internal world are all the challenges from the external world: parents, school, rules, friends, potentially challenging situations like going to the doctor or going to the grocery store or going to bed or eating something weird – the often mundane experiences that can be intense for kids.
You both root for Dory, and sympathize with the people around her who are trying to get her to act more normal enough to get through the next situation.
Also, these books are hilarious, and not just for the kids. Most funny-for-everyone books have wordplay and the like that sometimes goes over the kid’s head, but these pull it off through little snippets of non-Dory perspectives (like from her frazzled mom and embarrassed siblings). There are also some really excellently absurd crescendos, in which Dory’s real and imagined worlds come together at the plot’s climax.
The only real warning here is that if your kid is inspired to get up to mischief by characters who do the same, then you can expect some of that here. Dory never gets malicious or even devious, but she can’t both keep in line with school and home rules while also living inside a deep and ever-present narrative about her imaginary friends.
These are fun for a wide age range, with accessible illustrations, a mix of humor styles, great characters, and enough depth to stay interesting. If you or your kid has a low tolerance for silliness than these probably aren’t for you, but otherwise they’re worth a look.
Oh, and I would be remiss to mention that an old friend of mine, Avery Monsen, just published a picture book illustrated by Dory Fantasmagory author/illustrator Abby Hanlon. It’s called Chester Van Chime Who Forgot How to Rhyme. My copy is still on the way, but I’m biased enough to say you’ll enjoy it.
