by Moe Zilla

Created on: July 04, 2009

In 2001, Jon Scieszka wrote a very unusual book. It's the story of a little alien boy, whose speech uses words from 20 different (earth) languages. Even the font is strange, and it appears in strange places on the page. Lane Smith contributed some very imaginative drawings - after all, this is outer space. And Scieszka signals to his audience that this is going to be another one of his tall tales. The alien's name - and the book's title - is "Baloney, Henry P."

Scieszka had made a career out of writing fairy tales - or sometimes, re-writing them. In 1991 he described the princess who kissed a frog (not living happily ever after), and in 1989 offered "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs," attributed to "A. Wolf." This book's title page says it was "received and decoded" by Jon Scieszka, crediting Lane Smith with the story's "visual recreation." And Smith even dedicates the illustrations to his "planet Corona amikos"

Henry's alien schoolteacher, Miss Bugscuffle, threatens him with "permanent lifelong detention" unless he comes up with a good excuse. And as Henry spins an exonerating tale, Lane Smith's drawings add the perfect amount of extra weirdness. "I misplaced my trusty zimulis," Henry explains. "Then I...um...found it on my deski." Lane uses an eerie blue background for the surface of the alien's desk - where his yellow pencil is waiting. And the drawings get weirder and weirder...

The words are also defined on a "decoder" page at the back of the book. (It turns out the author is using the Latvian word for pencil and the Swahili word for desk). But the foreign words add a real strangeness to the whopper that the alien tells. "Someone had put my deski in a torakku," Henry says (using the Japanese word for truck). And when Henry jumps out of the runaway bus, he lands right on the launching pad for a...razzo. (Which is Italian for rocket).

Fortunately, Henry leaps out of the escape hatch - but unfortunately, he falls straight into another rocket. (Er, "razzo.") He ends up on the planet Astrosus, whose inhabitants threaten to eat him. (Astrosus is Latin for unlucky.) But you won't know how he changed their minds until you look up the words "giadrams and "cucalations," which are written in that mathematical "language" known as transposition. It's a great little story that the alien boy tells to his teacher, though in the end he's falling from a flying saucer, "only three seconds away from zerplatzen."

But fortunately, he's able to save himself...with his trusty zimulis.

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