Blob: The Ugliest Animal in the World

by Joy Sorman, Olivier Tallec (Illustrator), Sarah Klinger (Translator)

Overview

Blob the fish is excited. He's just won the ugliest animal in the world contest!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592702077
Publisher:	Enchanted Lion
Publication date:	10/31/2017
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	6 - 9 Years

About the Author

Joy Sorman was a philosophy professor before she devoting herself to journalism and writing. In 2005, she published her first work, Boys, Boys, Boys, a challenging feminist story about a girl who is a little different. Sorman also works in TV and radio journalism.
The work of Olivier Tallec has been described as “sensitive,” “stunning,” “breathtaking,” and “beautiful.” Tallec was born in Brittany, France, in 1970. After graduating from the École Supérieure d’Art Graphique in Paris, he worked in advertising as a graphic designer, after which he devoted himself to illustration. Since then he has illustrated more than seventy books.
Sarah Klinger is proud to count 'trilobite' as one of her first words. She has always been obsessed with unusual animals and the diversity of the natural world. After studying French and Psychology as an undergraduate, she received her MFA at School of Visual Arts in New York. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she draws, paints, translates, and has set a goal of walking every street on foot (eventually).

Editorial Reviews

"An irreverent and insightful modern fable about beauty, ugliness, the paths to acceptance, and how admiration hijacks our sense of self. ... The illustrations by Tallec lend the humorous story a lovely dimension of tenderness. Blob comes alive as a sensitive creature of contradictions—full of determination yet easily given to dejection, a living fable of ego and insecurity, easy to fault but also easy to love. ... Under Tallec’s subtle brush, we see a difficult realization dawn on Blob—privilege is bestowed largely by chance and little of actual substance separates the most fortunate from the least fortunate. There is something charmingly subversive about the very premise, as paradoxical as the idea of trying to fail at failure. There is also something profound in the questions it raises about our civilizational fascination with beauty and its counterpoint—what does it really mean to be ugly..."—Brain Pickings
“An insightful tale about beauty and self worth. The illustrations are incredible with personality and humor oozing from the pages.” —The Reading Ninja

From the Publisher

02/01/2018
PreS-Gr 2—Follow the arc of a contest, fame, and a fall from grace from the perspective of the ugliest animal in the world. Blob the blobfish travels from deep in the ocean under a trench coat to compete against other (actual) animals. When he wins, the president of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society gives a stirring speech about resisting the deceit of cute animals, and Blob goes on to be famous and then spoiled by his fame. When his reign ends, he returns home to tell tales at the bottom of the ocean. Tallec's illustration style shines in this silly story through charcoal, paint, and pencil. The small format and the long paragraphs give it a chapter book feel while still being short enough to read aloud. The lack of moralizing is refreshing, and the story is well paced and amusing. VERDICT A subtle and charming French import with a great sense of humor.—Lisa Nowlain, Nevada County Community Library, CA

School Library Journal

2017-09-26
Life is a bowl of cherries when you are voted the ugliest animal in the world—until next year's contest.For years, Blob the fish has ascended from his 3,000-foot-deep Pacific home, donned a disguise so as not to make passers-by faint, and attended the world's-ugliest-animal contest. He has captured second and third but never the prize. This year would be different. There might be a bald uakari monkey, a naked mole rat, an aye-aye lemur, a proboscis monkey, an axolotl, a Vietnamese leaf-nosed bat in the running—all as repulsive as can be under the hand of the extremely artful Tallec—but Blob walks away with the sash and crown for his slimy, graceless, sheepish, pitiful self. He becomes the darling of the animal world and lives the high life for a year, rubbing shoulders with celebrities and becoming spoiled rotten and then depressed as his year approaches its end. He must hand his crown to, gulp, a forked-tailed caterpillar, and there is nowhere to go but down—3,000 feet down, back home, where, "like any traveler who returns home, Blob has many stories to tell. Sometimes, the bright lights and sparkling diamonds he describes seem far from beautiful." The change is abrupt and awfully subtle—readers who blink may miss it, though alert caregivers can use it as a springboard for conversation.A morality tale whose moral may go missing. (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews