Katie and Orbie Save Water

Kathy Corrigan is the journals editor at the OISE Press.

A purple-pink extraterrestrial named Orbie arrives one morning in
Katie’s garden with a note around his neck explaining that he is a
castaway from a planet that ignored the threat of pollution and is now
dying. Plucky young Katie scoops Orbie into her arms and off they go
together, garbage bags in hand, to scoop up the litter that bespoils our
own planet. That’s Book 1 in the Katie and Orbie Save the Planet
series. In Book 2, Wicks locates Katie and her grinning friend in the
sandbox and the bath, where Orbie is instructed in the necessity of
filling the tub only to the level of one’s navel and of turning off
all dripping taps.

Enchanting tales (as their back covers state)? No, not enchanting:
simplistic and naive are more apt adjectives for these stories, which
trivialize complex environmental issues in an attempt to bring them down
to four-year-old levels, and which do so in a pedantic style that serves
only to get across the message. To be fair though, the second book is an
improvement on the first, being a more cohesive story and one with
humor.

Wicks’s father did the drawings, which are cute and charming in the
usual Ben Wicks way. The books are well designed, too, and attractive in
a pleasant fashion.

Basically, however, Wicks has missed the boat. Story and style should
take precedence over message, not vice versa. And tales that really are
enchanting, those that move children on a deep level of the psyche, are
more apt than Wicks’s to fill them with the sort of wonder and love
for this planet that will lead them to care for it.