Fly Guy's Big Family and Noodleheads See the Future by Tedd Arnold

This week's contributor is Danielle Jones, a youth and teen public librarian in Portland, Oregon. She is currently serving on ALSC’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force and the 2018 Sibert Committee.

Tedd Arnold has garnered two Geisel Honors for books in his Fly Guy series  (2006 Hi! Fly Guy and 2010  I Spy Fly Guy).  His keen sense of humor is a match for what beginning readers find hilarious, and he is able to repeatedly deliver books that have mass appeal.

Next in the Fly Guy series is Fly Guy’s Big Family. Buzz, a young boy notices his pet fly, Fly Guy, is drawing picture’s of Fly Guy’s family. Buzz, realizing that Fly Guy is missing his family, decides to hold a surprise party for Fly Guy inviting hundreds of Fly Guy’s closest relatives.

Many factors make this title very Geisel worthy. Humor is a propelling forces keeping the reader engaged. Simple short sentences and use of a controlled vocabulary with plenty of white space leaves room for decoding and comprehension. The illustrations reinforce the text, and there is lots of word repetition. “Surprise” is repeated throughout the story and the word “drawing” is shown both as a verb and a noun. A word like “cousin” that might pose challenging to sound out, is cleverly introduced with Arnold’s use speech bubbles when Buzz meets the first of Fly Guy’s family members to arrive for the party when she introduces herself as “Cuzz.” Cousin is then later repeated several more times.

One double page spread that might create debate among committee members is a double page spread showing Fly Guy reuniting with several family members. Arnold is playing with phonemes rather than using true spellings. Some might find that readers will delight in sounding out the fly pronunciations, while others might see it as challenging reading with introducing improper spelling of words at this stage in reading development.

Also out this year by Arnold is Noodleheads See the Future, the second in his graphic novel Noodlehead  series that pays homage to folklore’s noodlehead stories. Arnold’s pasta shaped characters, Mac and Mac,  and “Meatball” the antagonizer, get the humor rolling in this title where characters often state the obvious, but the two Macs view it as them “seeing the future.” Short chapters build on each other carrying threads of previous stories full circle to a satisfying ending and also offer readers a great "’page-turning’ dynamic.

What makes this a great graphic novel - its use of more rare words (those words that are used mostly in daily conversation, and outside the controlled vocabulary of most readers) - might deter it from being a great early reader. Noodleheads doesn’t maintain the controlled vocabulary that Arnold uses in the Fly Guy series. Words like “bruise” and “piece” are used several times, but the illustrations don’t always give context clues as to their meaning, and if it is a hard word to decode, the reader will miss the joke, and might get frustrated. Established readers however will delight in exploring these funny folk tales in a new way.