Darcy Polny is full of beans and so is the main character from his first children’s book. The former long-time St. Albert resident has just published Jelly Bean Jake, Full of Beans, a colourful and inventive tale that introduces the reader to a cute storyline with enticing stickers that can put you or your child right on the page itself.
Polny has an open invitation for anyone who owns a copy. He will put a photograph of your face on a red jelly bean with a green scarf found at the beginning of the book, and then you can play a game of finding the same candy on each and every page, similar fun to Where’s Waldo.
There’s also a fair bit of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or Alice in Wonderland-style adventure as Jake, the main character, eats so many jelly beans that he passes out in some kind of sugar-coated haze and dreams that he shrinks to the size of a bean himself.
For Polny, the concept is more about seeing things through a child’s eyes than anything.
“I realized that kids looked at the world a little differently,” he began, recalling an anecdote from his youth. “When I was going to art school years ago, I was working in a day care putting myself through school. I picked up two of those long brown tables with the metal legs and stacked them on top of each other. I picked them up and there were two little kids standing there and watching me. They went, ‘Wow! Did you see that? That big giant man just picked up those two tables!’ Well, that sparked the fact that kids see things so differently.”
That event brought back a personal memory about his first form of transportation.
“I used to have a trike with a big front wheel. I found it in my mother’s garage a couple of years ago and it was just this tiny blue bike but to me at that time it was just this huge, huge bike. I couldn’t even reach the pedals. I guess that’s the reason I wrote the book. It was just to show the world that kids see things differently than we do. They see things really big, everything is huge.”
Adding to the fun is a bunch of goofy gags like different objects like birthday balloons and the fridge, all shaped like jelly beans. Jake’s dog wears glasses and he has a grandpa with really skinny legs and a big bum. He wears a tea cosy as a hat. Jake believes that the candies have magical properties and can melt anything. In his dream he has to save his grandpa from being melted too.
This is a fine and fun story specifically for kids but I don’t see any reason why adults can’t enjoy it too. I loved it and Polny himself got a lot of pleasure out of writing it.
“The jelly bean is more of a metaphor for his escape, his mind takes over and he escapes into a world of just getting smaller.” He mentioned that he already has ideas for future kids’ books. According to him, he is just like Jake — he can’t stop his imagination.
“Sometimes my daughter gets mad at me because I do have a different way of saying things. My imagination gets me in trouble.”
