Lucinda Belinda Melinda Mc Cool
Lucinda Belinda Melinda McCool is a terrible creation, a horrible girl, a hateful person in a long line of disgusting characters in children’s literature. I love her.
Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross have made a wonderful book in the tradition of Roald Dahl and other irreverent wordsmiths.
Lucinda Belinda Melinda is image-obsessed. She is perfectly groomed and utterly cool. She also has an opinion on the way her friends look: ‘She’d point at their faults very loudly in class/And insist they correct them in front of the glass.’
Finally, she comes up against a very unkempt monster and despite his terrifying appearance, Lucinda Belinda Melinda takes him to task about his general grooming. ‘Not all stories have happy endings’, the text informs us and so it transpires here. It seems that a beautiful exterior will not disguise a black heart, as Lucinda Belinda Melinda learns to her cost.
This is a moral tale for out times and reminded me of the German writer Heinrich Hoffman, who wrote Shockheaded Peter, ten illustrated stories, that showed how bad behaviour could have disastrous consequences.
I love rhyming picturebooks and the rhyme here is splendid. It bounces and skips across all of Melinda’s doings and then crashes to a halt to give the reader a pleasant frisson of horror at the end of the tale. Tony Ross brings the whole thing to life with illustrations bursting with colour and energy.
This is one to read again and again.
