Vote for Me!

by Martin Baltscheit, Marc Boutavant (Illustrator)

Overview

The lion loves elections—he wins every time. But when the mouse decides to run for president, other animals offer up their own candidates. Each one has a cause to champion: the ant wants a busier schedule, the German shepherd wants more law and order, and the wildebeest just wants everyone to live in peace. With so many options, how can the animals ever decide? 

Amusingly told through vibrantly colored illustrations, Vote for Me! introduces readers to the wild process of selecting a good leader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781467459006
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/28/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

MARTIN BALTSCHEIT has written and illustrated over forty books for children. He has won both the German Youth Literature Award and the German Youth Theatre Prize. This is his English-language debut. Martin lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Visit Martin's website at baltscheit.de.

MARC BOUTAVANT is a graphic artist, illustrator, and comic strip creator. His books include Dumpster Dog (Enchanted Lion), Ghosts (Enchanted Lion), and Around the World with Mouk(Chronicle). The Mouk stories were adapted into an animated TV series in France. Marc lives in Paris.

Editorial Reviews

02/17/2020

A supremely confident lion always runs unopposed for president; one suspects that his postvote parties, where the animals get “as much cake and strawberry-coconut juice as they wanted,” play a part in his success. But when a mouse quite reasonably asks, “What’s the point of elections if we can’t choose between several candidates?” she triggers a deluge of candidacies with self-interested platforms. The cat promises that “you will always have fresh mice to eat”; the fox pleads to “end all borders” while eyeing the fence around the chicken coop. The vote is split so many ways that every candidate but the lion wins. But instead of coalition building, mayhem ensues: the pictures, which up to this point have resembled witty, vintage nursery murals, devolve into a scary, scorched no-man’s land where it’s eat or be eaten. Amid “all the chaos and unhappiness,” the lion offers everyone the chance to “start over” by voting for him—and he wins yet again, unanimously. There are certainly more rousing endorsements of democracy available to readers, but Baltscheit and Boutavant (the Ariol series) successfully inject realpolitik into the election picture book genre. Ages 4–8. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2020-02-09
Anthropomorphic animals hold a presidential vote in this story originally published in France in 2012.

In a land inhabited by big-eyed, anthropomorphic animals, the male lion is always elected president. Every five years he asks, “Who’s voting for me?” and all the animals give him their votes, after which they “have as much cake and strawberry-coconut juice as they [want].” But when a mouse challenges this practice and says there should be more than one candidate, the other animals get on their candidate soapboxes—and some clever political satire follows. After the secret vote is held, each candidate, one per animal group, has received one vote except for the lion, who didn’t vote. (The system represented seems to be quasi-parliamentary—only each group’s representative has a vote—making this a poor primer for U.S. electoral politics.) Chaos ensues as each new president engages in partisan self-interest. Disenchanted, the mouse seeks out the lion to help—which the lion agrees to do by becoming president again. This theme of patriarchy is reinforced by subtle misogynistic messages: The female ostrich is depicted as silly, the female carp as unintelligible, and the lioness as merely a helpmate to the lion. There’s also a not-so-subtle message about initiative: Don’t bother, the story seems to say, since only the lion is wise enough to preside over a diverse population. The colorful, well-rendered illustrations are lively and often amusing in their clever depictions of animals’ expressions and actions.

This advancement of patriarchy is way past its sell-by date. (Picture book. 5-8)

Kirkus Reviews