Up A Tree! Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

IT ALL BEGAN... WHEN FLOYD'S KITE BECAME STUCK IN A TREE. HE TRIED PULLING AND SWINGING BUT IT WOULDN'T COME UNSTUCK.

THE TROUBLE REALLY BEGAN WHEN HE THREW HIS FAVORITE SHOE TO KNOCK THE KITE LOOSE.

AND THAT BECAME STUCK, TOO!

What's a guy to do? Well, he still has the other shoe, but when he hurls it into the offending tree, the other shoe doesn't drop.

It's stuck too.

Floyd is obviously not a kid who thinks outside the box. He pitches his cat Mitch at the stuff stuck in the tree.

CATS GET STUCK IN TREES, BUT THIS WAS GETTING RIDICULOUS.

Don't say you weren't warned. We can see where this one is going, as we say, as in short order Floyd borrows his friend's bike and a neighbor's ladder to toss at the tree, knowing full well that they need to be back in place posthaste before they're missed, but alas, they stick up there as well.

The situation escalates in the best "old lady who swallowed a fly" tradition, with the tree growing impossibly top-heavy with improbable missiles--Floyd's front door, the milkman (who definitely needs to get back to work) and an orangutan (who's got to have better things to do). The absurdity escalates as does the tree, soon filling up with a neighbor's house (complete with harried housewife), a firetruck and fireman, and a saw, which the reader fully expects the fireman to use to top the tree and get everything back on terra firma. But in this fantastical adventure, that, too, is not to be. Then, suddenly, Floyd gets his wish:

THERE WAS NO MORE ROOM LEFT IN THE TREE AND THE KITE CAME UNSTUCK.

FLOYD WAS DELIGHTED, ENJOYING THE REST OF HIS DAY.

FLOYD FEEL ASLEEP, EXHAUSTED.

THOUGH BEFORE HE DID, HE COULD HAVE SWORN THERE WAS SOMETHING HE WAS FORGETTING.

Kids will chortle at the total absurdity of this little cumulative tale, which Oliver Jeffers narrates with appropriate deadpan sangfroid. There is plenty of room in this vertically-gifted format for Jeffries' tangle of a tree and its improbable embellishments to grow, and his illustrative style is well fitted to this imaginative tale, with Floyd himself as stylized stick figure whose outfit is a simple plaid rectangle and whose tree is a simple trunk with a circular scribble for foliage. Jeffries' witty text is done up in a hand-printed combination of childlike cursive and manuscript, and the overall effect is uniquely charming. Stuck (Philomel, 2011) will provide giggles which will escalate along with Floyd's ever-more-loaded tree all the way to the final wry ending. Kids will be stuck on Stuck.