When I Grow Up Bigger Than Five

Noreen Mitchell is a librarian with the Toronto Public Library.

Jacob is a little boy who keeps changing his mind about what he wants to be when he grows up bigger than five. Each time he is exposed to a new occupation, he forgets his old interest and takes up the new one so that, in turn, he considers becoming a marble maker, a trampoline jumper, a zoo keeper, a vacuum truck driver, a geologist, and a newspaper publisher. With each new interest, there are indulgent adults who try to provide him with information about the various jobs that he is considering. Of course, no hard decisions are possible or desirable at the age of five so that the story ends indecisively with Jacob contemplating yet another possibility.

Even though the basic idea behind this story is good in that it mirrors little children’s real-life interest in the future and it offers a great variety of job options — not all of which are professional — the story is somehow unsatisfying. The tone is didactic and the storyline is dull with only a few bits of weak humour: “He pretended to shave and sprayed smelly stuff under his armpits, just like his dad.” The author avoids stereotyped characterization, on the one hand, with Jacob’s father, but yields to it, on the other hand, with a suspender-twanging publisher as well as other employees of the newspaper. The flatness of the text is not very much improved by the illustrations, either, since these, while competently drawn, lack liveliness also. A useful but flawed work.