2 out of 5

An overlong, unfortunately repetitive take on a cute concept.  ‘Long Ears’ is a childhood imagination story.  Latchkey kid Max – also known by the nickname that is the book’s title – lives in a fantasy world with his stuffed toy ape, Jam, in a Calvin and Hobbes-esque twist on reality: Max sees Jam as real, and everything Max experiences is translated into his world as an adventure with Jam.  The book has a pretty delightfully hilarious sense of playfulness at first, Max and Jam “space ninjas” packing slug sandwiches for future gallivanting, and Thung seemingly expertly weaves enough nudges of reality into the intro so that we understand that Max’s Dad is no longer around.  When, yet again, Mom leaves a note with money telling Max to fend for himself for dinner, he and Jam decide to go to ‘headquarters’ to find Captain Big Nose.

‘Headquarters’ is a theme park.  Captain Big Nose is Max’s dad.  These things are absolutely clear through context.  But Thung makes her first misstep a few pages in by suddenly showing us the reality of the situation.  Because she had so cleverly avoided this up to this point, it feels almost insulting to suddenly drop the curtain.  It also causes a big stall in the narrative: to transition back to fantasy, Thung chooses splash pages where Max narrates his and Jam’s adventures.  It’s not a bad structural concept, but the story is a bit too wandering to justify it, and thus the technique ends up feeling a bit random and forced.  A few more pages in, Max and Jam find a baby elephant who’s being kept at the park, and mistreated in a stereotypical bad-guy-mistreats-animals way.  Hearing the bad guys (the park workers, or keepers, or whatever) refer to the elephant as “big nose,” Max makes the leap that the creature might know something about Captain Big Nose, and pledges to rescue him.  In order to fully establish that the bad guys are bad guys, Thung shows us the keepers, then shifts the image to a silhouette of the hunters that could’ve captured the elephant.  This marks another hiccup in the narrative, as the story up to this point has been from Max’s perspective.  Why we needed to see this from the elephant’s eyes is unclear.  As things continue on, Max’s mom becomes a great mother, Max saves the elephant, Max grows up.  The end.

As soon as the dad element was introduced, we could probably expect an ending of this nature.  Fine.  As long as the tale is pleasing along the way, predictable plotting can be acceptable.  But combining predictable plotting with page-padding that beats a concept over our head… that, to me, was the most off-putting aspect of the book.  Frequently, Max sees his father in a dream, waving goodbye.  Too frequently.  The effect could have been very poignant when used at a key moment, but instead, it ends up feeling like another aspect of that rambling structure, where Diana has a page count in mind, and several ‘sections’ – dream sections, reality sections, dad sections – that she’ll repeat until she gets there.

The art is pretty delightful.  Thung has a great sense of comedic pacing, and her rendering of Max’s imaginations are enjoyably excessive.  The moments where we’re playing around with pure fantasy are a joy, and those moments – while flipping through the book – were what caught my eye and made me curious to buy the book.  However, not having confidence (in us, in herself) to leave things a bit more open, and instead make ‘what’s going on’ very, very clear, diminishes the levity of these scenes.  And what could’ve been an effective short story seems unnecessarily extended by repeating structurally similar scenes that don’t add much to the narrative.

Just go weirder next time, Diana, and I’ll be on board.