Gaijin Book Review: Jackson/Kimura's "Potato Pals" Series

In a highly competitive field where authors and publishers compete for the whims and needs of fickle 5-year-olds, Patrick Jackson and Rie Kimura have stumbled on something special. Their "Potato Pals" series hits all the important points as most ESL book series, going to destinations that have already been visited by superstars like Spot and Thomas the Tank Engine -- ___ Goes to the Farm, ____'s Morning Routine, ____ Goes to School -- and yet, as familiar and tired as the genreic tropes may seem, the kids get a kick out of them. They laugh when presented with the simple pictures and simpler sentences, ones they've seen dozens of times before; ordinarily, the kids respond to a picture with the caption "brush your teeth," they respond very much as though they were being told to brush their teeth (that is, unimpressed), but with the Potato Pals, the most ahumorous sentence becomes funny times!

To learn the secret of Potato Pals, we have to go no further than the basic premise of the series. In short, the series is an examination of the daily adventures and trivialities that make up the lives of six close friends, Daisy, Buddy, Nina, Dean, Joy, and Chip. They are all potatoes. They go to Potato School, are woken up in the morning by their Potato Mothers, drive Potato Cars, play Potato Soccer, have Potato Birthday Parties, and carry Potato Umbrellas when it rains in Potato Land. Most of them wear shoes and only one article of clothing, such as glasses or a hat. Some of the other Potato Citizens of their Potato World have moustaches.

This gave me nightmares for weeks.

No attention is paid to the fact that these creatures are living in a grotesque fantasy land that mocks our own world in its ghoulishness. Perhaps that's what the kids find funny: young as they are, children can instinctively pick up on the abject absurdity of a potato brushing its single Potato Hair when it wakes up in the morning. To illustrate using in the traditional Japanese conventions of Internet pictures:

Left hauntingly unanswered are the myriad questions raised by this series. For instance, consider this picture:

Just off the top of this reviewer's head: are we to assume that the larger potato looking on approvingly is the protagonist's (Buddy's) mother? Is this then a universe in which potatoes give live birth like the mammals of our world? Or was Buddy named from the way he budded from his mother's own flesh? Do potatoes need to eat, and are they omnivorous, as the breakfast spread suggests? Is that hair or long, dyed potato eyes? Um, eww? Also, I would ask where the butter came from, but that question was addressed quite satisfactorily in the tome "Potato Pals Go to the Farm," where potatoes are shown milking cows and, in a shocking display of pseudo-cannibalism, feeding corn and carrots to pigs that are being raised for the slaughter.

Astute readers might recognize that similar book series, such as the aforementioned Thomas the Tank Engine, also feature parahuman oddities imbued with human emotions who engage in interpersonal drama. To that I would only say that Thomas the Tank Engine, for all his shenanigans and goofy smiles, is still a damn train. He rides on tracks and has concerns like keeping schedules and not falling off the tracks.

The darkest questions raised by the Potato Pals, ones that reach deep into the psyche of the reader, concern of the role of humans in this twisted allegory. As far as this reviewer is concerned, there are two options for the cosmology of Potato World: either this is a horrible parallel universe, one where readers can only assume that humans are killed and eaten with ketchup just out of sight...

Google Image result for Wendy's french fries. Thank you, I'm outta here!

...or else Buddy and friends exist in an unseen world within our own reality a la Toy Story, and the ultimate fate of the Potato Pals lies in the stomachs of the children who cruelly delight in their hash browns' fantastic origins. Who knows, maybe the Potato Pals are fully aware of their status as a food. Maybe good Potato Pals go to Potato Heaven or are reincarnated as Fry Kids. In any case, Jackson and Kimura keep us guessing in a delightfully perverse series that drills verb tenses admirably.

A-