A Sudsy Children's Book for Adults
Tom Robbins' "B is for Beer" is a Treat
Not Just Another Children's Book
And it's not just any children’s book. Robbins, whose books include Still Life with a Woodpecker, Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is out with B is for Beer (Ecco, April 2009, ISBN 780061687273), which is subtitled “A Children’s Book for Grown-ups, A Grown-up Book for Children.”
And as simple — if not slightly off-kilter — as that might sound that is exactly what he has done. A 125-page flight of fancy about a five-year-old named Gracie who is determined to find out about beer, the mysterious beverage that all of the adults she knows seem to enjoy but she is supposed to be forbidden from even tasting.
“Beer. That stuff that’s always on TV.’ She deepened her voice, ‘Better tasting!’ ‘Less filling!’ ‘Better tasting!’ ‘Less filling!’ She giggled again. It’s like Pepsi for silly old men!”
Enter kindly Uncle Moe, who seems like a stand-in for the author, a sixties-throwback with a somewhat benevolent view toward the universe. He explains to her that beer come from hops, which she assumes to be a kind of bug.
“No pumpkin, beer isn’t extracted from grasshoppers,” Robbins has Uncle Moe explain. “Nor hop toads, either. A hop is some funky vegetable that even vegans won’t ear. Farmers dry the flowers of this plant and call them hops. I should mention that only the female hop plants are used in making beer, which may be why men are so attracted to it. It’s a mating instinct.”
He promises to take her on a beer tour, teach her all there is to know but has to back out when he drops a can of Sapporo on his foot.
The Beer Fairy Arrives
Gracie grows despondent and eventually takes a beer on her own, which leads to her noticing “a small winged creature of some sort was perched on her upper chest. At first, it looked to be a dragonfly, standing on its hind legs, if dragonflies can be said to have hind legs, but it was pacing to and fro and anybody who’s paid attention knows that dragonflies can’t walk.”
Of course, it’s the Beer Fairy, whose arrival actually leads to some of the slower passages as the some of the prose gets bogged down in technical explanations of how beer is made.
While not perfect, the book is largely fun, filled with whimsy that is pretty much what it sets out to be – a children’s book for adults and an adult book for children though I’m not sure that kids Gracie’s age will really enjoy it as much as their parents.
Dead-on Description
The thing to remember about Robbins is that when he’s at his best, he’s truly a delight. Here’s his description of Seattle, where Gracie lives:
“Do you know about drizzle, that thin, soft rain that could be mistaken for a mean case of witch measles> Seattle is the world headquarters of drizzle, and in autumn it leaves a damp gray rash on everything, as though the city were a baby that had been left to long in a wet diaper and then rolled in a newspaper.”
Exactly.
A Kids Book for Grown-ups
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