Book Review: City Under the City by Dan Yaccarino

City Under the City

by Dan Yaccarino (jP Yaccarino)

 

This brand-new children’s picture book felt like a throwback to my own childhood. The artistic style of this one captured the tone and feel of a book published in the late 1960s or early 1970s. This is “dystopian fiction” for children.

 

in City Under the City, Bix is a child in a futuristic city where the humans are all helped and watched by a collection of floating giant eyes…who provide all that the human beings need, but discourage individuality and actual “thinking”. Bix is a precocious and stubborn little kid, who resists the conformity that the Eyes impress upon everyone else.

 

When a friendly mouse shows Bix the way to a hole to escape the “perfect” city they live him, Bix follows, and discovers an amazing old city hidden beneath the surface of the modern high-tech futuristic reality everyone else simply accepts. There, he discovers a massive collection of pre-Eye books in a library and learns to think clearly on his own.

 

For a simple children’s story, this is actually a template for resisting authoritarianism and dogma, as Bix brings his new-found knowledge back to his family and launches as a resistance movement against the all-seeing Eyes. I enjoyed this on all the levels it was presented, but especially the cute artistic style, that reminded me of watching The Jetsons as a kid.

 

( official Dan Yaccarino web site )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

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