Dr
Boogaloo and The Girl Who Lost Her Laughter
(Penguin Random
House Australia, 2017)
Written by Lisa
Nicol, illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett
Tags: Children’s
novel, Reading, Music
I’ve been wanting to
write this review for a long time, especially since I unofficially declared
this book my favourite children’s novel of 2017. I even met the author, Lisa
Nicol, at this year’s Kids&YA Festival at Writing NSW and was able to tell
her that in person. So, here it is.
The Plot
Dr Boogaloo is a specialist
in curing ‘unusual complaints’. In fact, it is said that he treats ‘every kind
of childhood disorder you can think of, from Can Only Sleep If Wearing A Pair
Of Goggles And A Snorkel Syndrome to uncontrollable swearing every time the
afflicted opens his or her mouth.
In other words, Dr
Boogaloo steps in, where ordinary treatment fails.
He treats illness
not with pills and portions. No, no, no! He has one cure only – music! The key,
he knows, lies in the dosage and kind of music, of course.
“Musical medicine is an exact
art. And it’s extraordinarily complicated.”
The way Dr. Boogaloo
explains it is this – everyone has their own tune but
“Sometimes, for one reason or
other, we get all out of tune. We lose the beat, you might say.”
A girl named Blue,
yes after the colour (I will come to that in a moment), suffers from an awful
illness for quite some time: 712 days, to be exact. Only one person might have
a clue as to how to cure this debilitating and isolating, stigmatising
affliction of No-Laughing Syndrome that causes Blue to be misunderstood and
lonely.
That person is Dr
Boogaloo.
But Blue’s loss of
laughter is a challenge unlike any other he’s faced before. In three hundred
years, not one patient left Boogaloo’s Family Clinic of Musical Cures uncured,
but when he can’t seem to find a cure for Blue he is about to give it all up.
Theme(s)
Blue is different because she cannot laugh. Blue is not a name, but a state of mind. Not that we
don’t understand why – her mother treats her like a fashion accessory – she
changes her daughter’s name regularly, depending on the colour theme of her
designer home; her ever absent, animal shooting father make her feel different:
"Blue found many things about her parents difficult to understand […]
Blue felt as though she was born into the wrong family."
Dr Boogaloo and The
Girl Who Lost Her Laughter is a book about the power of music.
It shows the ability of music to transform thoughts and
feeling; its ability to nurture the act of listening – to others and to one
self. The story illuminates the role
music plays in everyone’s life and
wellbeing.
“Not
everyone hears the right music – or knows how to listen. And they suffer
terribly… if you don’t let your heart fly, your tune gets right out of whack.
It’s a bit like spending your whole life indoors – it’s just not good for your
health.”
The book introduces the reader to a global collection of
musical instruments, their sounds and the way they are plaid. Nurturing
creativity/music from early childhood can bring not only joy, but basic life skills
that can be a tool to feeling and expressing connectedness with one self and
others.
Pictures
Musical notes, people, animals and other objects depicted
throughout the book, as well as on the cover, seem in a state of flux: they
move in different beats and rhythms, or float on melodies across the page.
Illustrator Daniel
Gray-Barnett captures Blue’s isolation particularly well in the image of the
cover where some invisible force pushes her outside world – people, music,
animals – centrifugally to the margins of the paper.
Whatever sound or vibration causes this – it
has no rhythm, melody, pitch, or timbre. Blue is visibly out of tune.
The
Words
Apart from the fact that Dr Boogaloo’s wife Bessie uses an
iBike that transports them both to higher grounds while paddling to the clinic
everyday, the book offers a number of beautiful sounding words.
(There are so many, I can’t choose, so I leave this for the
reader to explore!)
Back to the iBike ride:
"Off they went. Bessie’s skirt billowed out like butterfly wings. Blue
closed her eyes and felt the iBike lift up into the sky."
It also makes Blue feel the music in her body:
"You can feel your heart flutter as soon as the music hits you, right?
That’s the wings being attached. Snap, snap! Then if you pay attention, you can
feel your heart nudging your ribs, dipping into your stomach and flying out
through your skin. That’s that tingling feeling."
And
"Sometimes our strings get tangled up. That’s called falling in love.
That’s why you can’t fall in love without music."
Sometimes, the sentences have a song-like feel to them:
"The research was in.
The facts were firm.
The truth was crystal clear!"
But also:
"Any little hee hees in that time?" Asked the Doctor."No,""ho hos?""None.""What about tee hees?""No," said Blue, barely a whisper."haw haws, yuk yuks?"
Dr Boogaloo and The
Girl Who Lost Her Laughter is funny, sad and witty and makes you laugh
every other page. It makes you want to
learn a fabulous instrument - who wouldn't want to try out the djembes or the swan-bone flute? It’s a great book for
middle-grade readers or for reading together out aloud. A good book when you feel the need for a good
tune or a good laugh. :-)
