by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 19, 2010

This book has some wonderful illustrations. There's tall little skyscrapers built out of apples or dirt clods, and they fill up the entire page. Illustrator David Roberts cleverly uses white backgrounds, so the pictures seem to continue climbing right past the story's text. It tells the story of a young boy named Iggy Peck - who obviously has a natural talent for architecture!

Adding to the fun, the story is told entirely in rhyme. In fact, author Andrea Beaty even adds some bonus "internal rhymes" to the first and third sentence, so their first half always rhymes with their second.  

"Young Iggy Peck is an architect
and has been since he was two,
when he built a great tower - in only an hour -
with nothing but diapers and glue."

Sure enough, the first drawing shows the enormous diaper tower - as the rhyme on the second page notes her mother's loss of enthusiasm when she realizes the diapers weren't clean. The illustrator contributes a funny drawing of the mother's chagrined face, while in the text, Beaty manages to rhyme "stinks" with "sphinx." Because Iggy's next project is building a life-sized replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza!

"When Iggy was three, his parents could see
his unusual passion would stay.
He built churches and chapels from peaches and apples,
and temples from modeling clay."

It's a very light-hearted book, since each illustration has the quirky comedy of a New Yorker cartoon, with Roberts' clean pen-and-ink drawings shaded with stylish watercolors. They're always worth studying closely, for the extra architectural details he's included (built from ordinary household objects). And with the intricate rhymes of Beaty, the story keeps bouncing along.

"Dear Ig had it made until second grade,
when his teacher was Miss Lila Greet.
On the very first day, she had this to say:
'We do not talk of buildings in here!"

There's a great illustration of Iggy's second grade class, while Beaty contributes a nice digression about the teacher's own traumatized childhood.  (She was abandoned on a tour of a tall skyscraper, and decided that loving architecture was unhealthy!) A showdown is inevitable, as Iggy ignores his teacher and builds a fantastic castle out of chalk. His teacher issues a stern warning - in rhyme, of course. ("You will not build in here. Is that perfectly clear?") But she changes her mind when the school picnic becomes stranded on an island after a bridge collapses - since it's Iggy's architectural skills that ultimately saves the day!

"It all became clear to Miss Lila Greer,
as she crossed that bridge over the stream,
There are worst things to do when you're in grade two
than to spend your time building a dream."

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