We’re talking about a guy that’s a member of the Humane Society’s board of directors and who has used MUTTS as a way of drawing attention to everything from The Wildlife Land Trust to New Jersey’s animal population control fund. I say that, even though I’m aware that animal rights are his passion. Known primarily as the man behind the MUTTS comic strip, I think it’s fair to say that McDonnell wasn’t the obvious person to write this book. Odds are that McDonnell’s a familiar name on the comics page of your local newspaper.

Backmatter include a short section “About Jane Goodall” and a “A Message from Jane” herself. And when she got older, her dreams really did come true. When she read her Tarzan she’d want to be in Africa with all the animals just like him. Jane was the type to climb tall trees on sunny days, or to hide in the chicken coop to uncover the source of eggs. With her stuffed chimp Jubilee at her side, there were lots of mysteries to notice too.

Jane is the rare picture book biography that manages to please biography fans, fiction fans, and chimpanzee fans (albeit, stuffed) alike. So really, one of the many things that I admire about Patrick McDonnell’s first foray into non-fiction is that his subject, Jane Goodall, presents him with early years that were practically custom made to be relayed.

Famous people do not necessarily arise out of interesting, cheerful childhoods, after all. Biographies of famous people that limit their focus almost entirely to their subjects’ childhoods are actually kind of rare. The advantage to this method is that you can actually explain a concept to a kid, by making the biographical subject into a kind of literary character. Which is to say, you give them breadth and depth and meaning, then do the whole summary of who they actually were in the Endnotes. Then there’s method #2: You take your subject and select just a moment from their life. Sometimes this method works well, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it used to be the only way of creating children’s biographies. Along the way he has to boil down a human life into as pure and simple a telling as possible. Adler’s specialty is synthesizing a person into 32 or 40 odd pages. He’s the fellow behind all those “A Picture Book of” books. Seems to me that if you want to introduce a six-year-old to a famous person there are two ways of going about it.

Me...Jane by Patrick McDonnell