eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
When Clarence Cochran wakes up one evening, he's shocked. Where are his antennae and his beautiful wings? And what is this strange pair of shorts that he's wearing? Clarence has changed from a cockroach into a tiny human boy! The other cockroaches are disgusted. Only Clarence's mother understands. "Be who you are," she says. "You will do wonderful things." And when the entire roach community – happily living in the messy Gilmartin kitchen – is threatened with extermination, Clarence does, setting out on a dangerous journey to enlist the help of ten-year-old Mimi Gilmartin in a quest to save his family and friends.
Expressive drawings add visual punch to this funny, thoughtprovoking modern fable that shows how even the most hostile species can find a way to coexist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429947268 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Lexile: | 840L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 7 - 10 Years |
About the Author
WILLIAM LOIZEAUX is the author of Wings, winner of an ASPCA Henry Bergh Award and a Golden Kite Honor Book for Fiction. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland. ANNE WILSDORF has illustrated many books, including Two Sticks by Orel Protopopescu, selected as a Best Children's Book of the Year, Bank Street College. She lives in Lausanne, Switzerland.
I grew up in the rolling hills of central New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 60s at a time when housing developments began to fill up the farmlands but there was still enough space for a boy to wander, dream, and even get safely lost in the woods. Early on in one of those summers, I found a baby mockingbird in the middle of our road. I took it home, fed it, and cared for it. It grew and learned to flutter, sing, and fly. It was my constant companion for a couple of months, during a period when I was still a kid but could sense that things were getting more complicated. Near the end of that summer, when I went on vacation with my family, I left the bird behind. When I returned, it was gone.
In the following years, I went to junior high, high school, and then off to college in upstate New York. I worked summers on a road crew and for a year as a greenskeeper’s assistant. Then I went to graduate school in Michigan, where I prepared to be a scholar and critic of literature, though mostly I found myself admiring the act of creating literature, the doing of the thing itself—as well as admiring the woman who would become my wife. Soon after, we got married and moved to the Washington D.C., area, where I started writing stories in the mornings and painting houses in the afternoons. While most of those stories still clutter my drawers, a few—as well as some essays—were published and have reappeared in anthologies. The brief life and death of our first daughter led to my book Anna: A Daughter’s Life, a memoir in journal form, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. That was followed, in 1998, by The Shooting of Rabbit Wells, a memoir about a young man I knew in high school.
It wasn’t until forty years after that summer with my bird that I thought of the experience as something to write about. One day, our second daughter, a grade-school kid at the time, found a sick baby bird in the yard, brought it into the house, and put it in a shoe box full of cotton. In her frightened and hopeful eyes I recognized my own childhood feelings, and my old story came flooding back. That story, remembered and imagined, is Wings.
I got the idea for my next children’s novel, Clarence Cochran, a Human Boy, while rereading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I thought, What if I invert Kafka’s story about a salesman who turns into a bug? What if, one evening, a young cockroach wakes up and finds himself turned into a miniature boy? The idea amused me, as did the possibilities for humor in presenting cockroach life as the norm and human beings as odd and even a little disgusting. (Belly buttons, for example, really are peculiar!) Then, since I was turning everything upside-down, I thought, Why not turn Kafka’s dark themes of alienation and ostracism into an affirming story for kids and parents about compromise, understanding, and our capacities for change and goodness? That, at least, was the plan. And carrying it out—imagining our plucky little hero, his cockroach world, and the challenges he faced—was fun and unpredictable, with twists and turns I didn’t expect, right up until the end.
Today, I teach in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University, and I live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with my wife, Beth, and my daughter, Emma.
Author and illustrator Anne Wilsdorf was born to Alsatian parents in Saint-Paul de Luanda, Angola, in 1954. After a childhood and adolescence spent living in many countries (Angola, Congo, Argentina, Morocco, France, and Belgium), she settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1976. There, she began publishing her drawings in newspapers and children¹s publications, followed by her first books. She has continued this path ever since, working with publishers in Switzerland, France, Germany and the United States. Her books, numbering more than twenty, have been translated into numerous languages, most recently into Korean.
Anne Wilsdorf was the Swiss candidate for the prestigious Andersen prize in 2000. Complementing her work as an illustrator, Anne Wilsdorf teaches illustration at l’Ecole Romande des Arts de la Communication, in Lausanne.
Read an Excerpt
Clarence Cochran, A Human Boy
By William Loizeaux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 William LoizeauxAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4726-8
CHAPTER 1
The Change
When young Clarence Cochran woke from disturbing dreams one evening, something seemed to have changed. True, he was lying in his familiar crevice in the wall behind the top shelf, high above the Gilmartins' stove and refrigerator. But that evening, his head felt different, oddly large, yet light. He shook it, but nothing arched or swayed gracefully in front of him. That's strange, he thought, I can't see my antennae. Then he looked down at the rest of his body. What he saw made him sit bolt upright. What has become of me?
Gone were the dark brown ridges on his belly. Gone were the tiny airholes along his sides through which he normally breathed. Gone were the two stiff hairs on the rear of his abdomen that warned him of trouble creeping up from behind — usually Floyd, one of his older brothers, who liked to tease and push him around.
He twisted his head to look behind him. Gone, as well, were his beautiful wings. But worst of all, where were his six trusty and many-jointed barbed legs that helped him scurry over the kitchen floor, up the walls, and upside down across the ceiling?
Clarence closed his eyes and wished he could go back to sleep. He'd been just fine that morning when he'd crawled deep down into his crevice and his mother had listened to his prayers and put him to bed. So maybe all this was just a dream. Maybe when he really and truly woke up, he'd be his old cockroach self again.
"Clar-ence!" his mother called from the shelf just below, where his family usually gathered before going down to the counters to eat and where the Gilmartins, their human hosts, still had three yellowing cookbooks and a wooden box full of recipes no one had used in years. Kathryn Gilmartin, the wife, mother, and family breadwinner, didn't have much time for cooking anymore. And Larry Gilmartin, her husband, who was in charge of the kitchen and walked their daughter Mimi to and from school, had about as much interest in cooking as he did in cleaning up afterward. His specialties were hot dogs, instant mashed potatoes, delivered pizza, and Chinese takeout.
"Clar-ence? I don't hear you stirring up there!" Clarence's mother called again in her cheery, musical voice. The evenings always made her happy and eager for the nightly search for food with her family. "Rise and shine!" she went on. "Up an' at 'em! Your father is waiting, hungry as a bear. And Floyd and Stephen are already down here, too. You don't want them hogging all the sweet-and-sour pork, do you?"
Clarence knew his brothers were up. He couldn't hear them yawning and grumbling in their sleeping places nearby on the top shelf. If he didn't get going, Floyd and Stephen would eat all the sweet-and-sour sauce and whatever remained of the fortune cookies! In a voice that came out more squeaky than normal, he yelled, "Coming!" Then, screwing up his courage, he opened his eyes in the dim light and looked again at his sorry self.
Inexplicably, a pair of plaid boxer shorts, the kind that humans wear, encircled his waist and hips. The rest of him was covered in skin the color of uncooked chicken, with bits of blond fuzz here and there. His body wasn't any longer, but it looked like it had stretched. And what had happened to his shell, with its rich brown color and hard finish? How could it be gone? How would he hold himself together? His legs — he could only count four, not six, of them now! — had become long, smooth tubes. And at the ends of each, five smaller tubes had sprouted, each ridiculously short and stubby.
With some relief, Clarence did notice one tiny, lonely hole in the middle of his abdomen, just above the elastic waistband of his shorts. Yet he didn't seem to be breathing through it, and it wasn't giving off that pleasant, stinky, and reassuring odor that usually made him feel at peace with the world and at one with his family.
Wondering about the rest of himself that he couldn't see, he clumsily stretched one of his strange front legs toward his head and then touched it. His head was bigger! He felt short thick hair that swirled and stuck up in the back, then a fleshy, shell-shaped thing that led into a waxy tunnel. On the front, he felt eyes, like grapes, sunk into deep sockets. Between them was a bump with two small holes, each with yucky, gooey gunk inside. He felt an oval mouth in which the parts worked oddly up and down and where a damp, flat, noodley thing flopped this way and that. "Hold on, I'll be right there!" he shouted, his voice still sounding squeaky.
"What, has the kid got a cold or something?" That was Clarence's father, who wasn't exactly at his best in the evenings before he got some food into him. He, too, was on the shelf below.
Then Clarence heard his mother reply, "Well, maybe he does have a cold or a fever. Poor child. I'll go up and see. It isn't like him to be so late."
"Tell him to move his precious little butt!" That was his annoying brother Floyd speaking.
"You mind your own business," his mother said to Floyd. "I'll handle this."
Clarence heard the soft patter of her steps as she climbed toward his crevice along the cupboard wall. Soon she was on the top shelf.
"No! Wait! Don't come in here!" he cried. He didn't want his mother, or anyone for that matter, to see him like this. If he could just hold her off a little longer, he might find a way to get back to his normal self.
"You all right?" she asked him gently, still out of sight.
"Yes! I'll be there in a minute!"
He heard his mother pause, then turn around.
"Well, get a move on!" his father called up to him.
"Let's go!" cried Stephen, who ordinarily paid more attention to preening his long wings and antennae than he ever did to Clarence. "I have an appointment," he announced, which meant that later he'd be meeting Martha McMoffit again, strolling with her, wing-to-wing, along the shadowy path beneath the radiator.
"Hurry along, Clarence," his mother called, more sharply than before.
Now Clarence tried to get on his legs and crawl out of the crevice. Usually this was easy. With his six strong, spiky legs and sticky claws, he'd scoot right up the steep, almost vertical wall of wood and crumbling plaster.
On this evening, though, everything was more complicated. He had no middle legs, and his smooth hind legs were absolutely worthless for climbing. Just looking at them made him feel faint. Still, with much awkward shoving and slithering, he moved his body from its lying-down position at the bottom of the crevice so that his stomach leaned against the sloped wall and the ends of his front legs could grab onto a narrow ridge. With all his might, he tried to pull himself up so he could see over the rim. But soon his front legs shook and weakened, until he slid sadly down the wall, splinters sticking into his stomach.
He tried to climb up again and again, but it didn't work. Exhausted, he slid down and collapsed on his back. Hopelessly, he looked up at the dark walls, as if from the bottom of an open grave. How will I ever get out of here?
CHAPTER 2What Is It?
That's when his mother's heart-shaped face, the face Clarence had known since he'd hatched as a wingless, naked nymph, appeared over the rim of the crevice. She must have heard his struggling. "Clarence?" She was peering down at him. "Is that you?"
He wasn't sure. "Yes, Mom, it's me — I guess," he said in a frail tone.
Her eyes went wide, and her head and antennae began to quiver. She let out a gasp: "Oh, my goodness!"
"What's going on up there?" came his father's irritated voice.
In seconds, Clarence heard the sound of feet scampering up the cupboard wall, onto the top shelf, past an old ball of string, through a grove of dusty wineglasses, over a tarnished candlesnuffer, and around the strange, ceramic teapot, shaped like a tropical bird.
Soon Clarence saw his father, Stephen, and Floyd, along with his mother, peering down from the rim of the crevice.
"Who's that?" his father asked.
"What is it?" his brothers said together.
"I think something's happened to Clarence," his mother replied. She was sniffling and weeping tears the size of dewdrops. "He doesn't look right."
"I'll say!" said Floyd.
"How do you even know it's him?" his father asked.
"I heard him speak," she said. "It was his voice. I heard him say 'Mom.' And those eyes! Look at them. They couldn't be anyone else's!"
"Are you sure?" Clarence's father said in disbelief.
Floyd, always the courageous one, took a few steps down the wall of the crevice to see Clarence more clearly. Like their father, he was stocky and shortwinged, almost like a beetle. You wouldn't think he'd be a natural on vertical surfaces, but the barbs on his legs were supersharp. He could cling to almost anything. "Check out its color," Floyd called back to the others. "Ewww!"
Grimacing, Stephen covered his eyes with one claw. "How can you even stand to look at it?"
As you might imagine, this was terribly upsetting to Clarence. He'd always known he was a little different from his brothers and most other roaches. He was quiet and shy. Some called him "dreamy." Like everyone in his family, he loved to eat, yet he wouldn't race each evening to be the first to the food. He wouldn't scuffle with the others and scramble over them. He liked sitting on the windowsill, watching the moon drift over the courtyard. He liked gazing at the labels on cans and bottles on the counters, and imagining shapes — a butterfly, a curly caterpillar — in the fascinating marks he saw on them. He'd never told anyone about this, but sometimes, as he studied those marks, he thought they were trying to speak to him. He'd imagine each mark making a sound, and together they'd make bigger sounds. But he couldn't understand what they were saying.
So he was, as his mother always said, "an unusual little fellow." Though never as unusual as this.
Lying on his back in the crevice, he tried to cry out, Guys! It's me, Clarence! Instead, fear and alarm clogged his throat. All he could do was grunt.
"Listen, he's trying to speak!" his mother said, drying her eyes. "We need to help him!"
"No, it's getting ready to do something nasty," Floyd said. "It's probably some weird wasp or snake, and you know what they like to do to us."
"Edith," Clarence's father put in, "something funny's going on here. I don't like the looks of this ..." He nodded toward Clarence. "Or that."
"What are you talking about?" his mother snapped. "That is our son down there!"
"Let's get out of here!" Stephen groaned. "Everyone else is out on the counters."
"All right," Clarence's mother said, glaring at her two oldest sons, "if that's your idea of brotherly love, then go. Just go! All of you. But I'm staying here to help him!"
"Be reasonable," Clarence's father said, patting the top of her head. "Look at the poor creature. No wings. No antennae. No middle legs. That can't be Clarence. It can't even be a cockroach. Clarence must be down below already with the others, chowing down the egg rolls. Maybe he snuck off early with his pal Willie."
While his mother shook her head at this — her youngest son was hardly the sneaky type — Clarence's father continued, "Come on, let's get some breakfast." He glanced at Clarence. "Maybe it, or whatever that is, will be gone when we get back."
"You heard me," Clarence's mother said firmly. "I'm staying. Go ahead and suit yourselves. Leave if you must."
And so they did — or at least Clarence's brothers did.
More slowly, Clarence's father turned and started to move away.
If only he could know it's me! Clarence thought, and with great effort, managed to say, "Dad?" It was barely a whisper.
"Did you hear that?" his mother asked.
For a moment, his father stood silently, peering at Clarence with astonished eyes. Then, turning to Clarence's mother, he said, "I'd better get the doctor."
CHAPTER 3Deliverance
When the sound of his father's steps had faded, Clarence's mother crept down the wall of the crevice in that hushed and watchful way that you approach the very ill. She was not what you would call a beautiful mother, but she had a graceful way of carrying her slender body. She studied Clarence, who stared back at her with his big, confused, and pleading eyes that seemed to be saying, Mom, what's happened to me?
And her own eyes seemed to be answering, Honey, I wish I knew. Halfway down the wall, she reached out her antennae and touched his shoulder, a touch he would have recognized anywhere. It reminded him of when he was sick with a fever, and she would cup her claw over his head, and that alone would make him feel better. Now she slowly moved her antennae over his ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and down his neck, careful of the splinters on his chest and stomach. She paid special attention to that hole in his middle.
"That's the strangest thing of all," she mused. "That and those silly shorts."
He knew he must be as disgusting to her as he was to himself. Still, she didn't cringe or back away. Instead, she came down to the bottom of the crevice.
"How do you feel?" she asked softly.
"Different," he said, his voice still weak.
She reached out her claw and opened it against his forehead. After a moment, she said, "You're warm, but you don't have a fever. Do you want to rest?"
"Yes, but not here," he said. Usually the crevice was his favorite place in the whole world. He fit so snugly into it, and Floyd seldom bothered him here. Now, however, it seemed cramped, stuffy, and dingy. He had a yearning for wider spaces. "I'd like some fresh air," he said.
This was an unusual request. It made his mother cock her head. "You sure?"
He nodded.
"Okay," she said. "But first, don't you want to get out of those shorts? They can't be very comfortable around your legs like that."
Now Clarence felt another strange thing. He felt very attached to his shorts, and the idea of taking them off in anyone's presence, including his mother's, filled him with fear and shame. "I think I'll keep them on," he said.
"Okay," she said again. Then she added, "What about those splinters? You don't want to keep those, do you?"
"No," he said, relieved that they'd found an area of agreement.
"Good. Let's see if we can take care of them." She bent over him and, operating her claws like tweezers, drew the splinters bit by bit from his skin. This hurt, but bravely he clenched the ends of his front legs and tried not to cry out or whimper.
"There," she said a while later. "Phew! All done. Feel better?"
"A little."
She took a step back, as if to consider the situation, weigh their options, and make a decision. "All right," she said, "now here's what we're going to do." She bent all six of her legs accordian-style, collapsing them, and lowered herself as flat as a rug. "Roll over onto my back," she said. "We used to do this when you were a nymph. Remember?"
Twisting and pushing, Clarence rocked his body side to side, and finally managed to roll onto her back, stomach down. With a pang, he breathed in her rich scent, like blue cheese, and felt her thin, lacy wings.
"Grab onto my shoulders with your front legs, or whatever they are," she said. "Wrap your hind ones around my shell."
He did this, more or less centering himself on her back. He was almost as big as she was.
Then, knee by knee and leg by leg, his mother raised herself up. With a flick of her head, she tossed her antennae up over the rim, like a couple of grappling hooks.
"Hang on," she said, "tight as a tick." And then, leaning into the slope, pulling hard on her antennae, she carried her son up and out of the crevice.
CHAPTER 4A Boy
Near the front edge of the top shelf, Clarence's mother gently slid him into a measuring spoon that had once been misplaced by the Gilmartins. To be exact, it was a teaspoon, and in it Clarence sat with his back perfectly cradled and his legs, from the knees down, hanging over the edge.
"Comfortable?" she asked as she went to get a bit of damp cloth to cool his forehead. He breathed the air that wafted through the screened window above the sink, gazed out on the moonlit kitchen, and nodded yes.
The Gilmartins lived in apartment #518 on the west side of a square seven-story building. Their windows overlooked a grassy, enclosed courtyard which, while he could often hear the sounds of traffic, made Clarence feel that the city was far away. In a building where safe housing was difficult to find, the Gilmartins' kitchen had always been a good place for a cockroach family. Neighbors were numerous and friendly. A garbage can overflowed in the cabinet beneath the sink. A humming refrigerator motor could keep you warm all winter. The faucet dripped steadily, providing drinking water. And on the kitchen table stood a sticky sugar bowl and a lamp with a beaded pull-string, where Clarence liked to swing back and forth with Willie, his best friend.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Clarence Cochran, A Human Boy by William Loizeaux. Copyright © 2009 William Loizeaux. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.