by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 30, 2009

Mr. Peabody's Apples is about a local baseball coach - but more importantly, it was written by Madonna. The sexy pop singer hoped to show another side of herself in the second of six books she would write after 2003. It was just five years before her 50th birthday.

The book opens with drawings of a baseball team, first in a wide-angle illustration of the view from a hill, and then up close in a frenzy of mitts and gangly limbs. But it's the only real action in the book, and Madonna's story-telling soon bogs with extraneous details. The town of Happville "wasn't a very big town," and the baseball team "had not won, but no one really cared, because they'd had such a good time playing." She introduces Billy Little - and that he "wasn't a very big boy" - and at the end of page one, he has his first conversation with the local baseball coach.

"Thanks, Billy, good job. I'll see you next Saturday."

There's nothing particularly magical about that beginning, but it sets up the message that's the book's real purpose. On page two it's Mr. Peabody who's walking down main street - which "wasn't a very big street" - before Madonna switches to a third character, "Tommy Tittlebottom." Mr. Peabody is soon victimized by a rumor that he takes apples from a grocer with paying for them. Soon he's teaching a lesson to the boys, showing them how the feathers from a pillow scatter far and wide in the wind. "Each feather represents a person in Happville," he warns sadly - leaving the book with no happy ending. "Next time, don't be so quick to judge a person," he says - and then he walks home.

"This book was inspired by a nearly 300-year-old story," Madonna writes on the inside flap, "that was told to me by my Kabbalah teacher." She attributes the story to Baal Shem Tov, the 18th century mystical rabbi, saying the story shows that words must be chosen carefully. (Reviewing Madonna's second book, Booklist wrote that it was "an improvement, perhaps because the story isn't hers.") "I hope that I have done [the rabbi's] story justice," Madonna writes on the cover - but there's one big problem. Is it a story you want to read to your kids?

The other problem is fairly obvious: Madonna is a singer, and not a professional children's writer. But most reviewers praised the work of her illustrator, Loren Long, who created colorful drawings offering a slightly stylized version of realism. And it's the last illustration that sneaks a happy ending onto this story after all.

Through the window Mr. Peabody is seen playing baseball, while on the bed is a pillow with every feather magically retrieved and stitched back into place.

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