The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen

Hey, Story Seekers!

We have a fish with a face problem.

Or an attitude problem.

Or possibly everybody else has a mind-your-own-business problem.

We're going underwater to investigate.

The Pout-Pout Fish, written by Deborah Diesen with pictures by Dan Hanna, introduces Mr. Fish, a gloomy blue-green fellow with a mouth that looks like it has given up on Tuesday.

His friends would like him to cheer up.

Mr. Fish would like everyone to understand that this is simply who he is.

Blub.

Blub.

Blub.

Readit has already decided he'd like everyone to stop commenting on Mr. Fish's face.

I suspect we're going to have a few things to discuss.

Book Breakdown

Mr. Fish is gloomy.

Not temporarily gloomy.

Professionally gloomy.

He swims around the ocean wearing a permanent pout and believes he's destined to spread his dreary mood wherever he goes.

His underwater neighbors disagree.

One after another, they approach Mr. Fish and suggest he could knock it off with the moping.

There's a jellyfish.

A squid.

Other sea creatures join the campaign.

Mr. Fish listens.

Then he explains that they're wasting their time.

This is his face.

This is his nature.

This is how things are.

And every encounter rolls back into the refrain.

That's where Deborah Diesen earns her bubbles. The rhymes bounce. The language is a pleasure in the mouth, and she isn't afraid of a big word when the sound is right. Mr. Fish carries around, in her phrase, a kaleidoscope of mope.

Say that out loud. That's a writer enjoying herself.

The repetition gives children something to grab onto, and the blub sequence practically demands that storytime become a performance.

You can see why this became a series.

Dan Hanna gives all that verbal play a wonderfully strange population to swim through. Mr. Fish is droopy and gloriously glum. Around him drift wide-eyed creatures with enormous expressions and enough personality that the pictures never feel like scenery behind the rhyme.

Kirkus singled out exactly that, praising Hanna's cartoonish, bug-eyed underwater world.

Mr. Fish doesn't merely tell us he's miserable.

Look at him.

That face has paperwork.

Then an unfamiliar shimmering fish arrives.

She doesn't give Mr. Fish another speech.

She kisses him.

Right on the mouth.

Mr. Fish is stunned. Then delighted. He decides he's been wrong about himself all along. He isn't destined to spread gloom. He can spread cheer instead.

And kisses.

Lots of kisses.

We'll come back to that.

Oh yes.

We will.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile AD660L · Guided Reading Level O · DRA 34-38 · ATOS 3.0 · grades PreK to K. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Thirty-two pages, ages 3 to 6. The AD code means adult-directed: this is built to be read to a child, not by one.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

As a read-aloud, this thing moves.

Diesen understands the pleasure of a refrain.

First time through, kids listen.

Next time, they recognize it.

Pretty soon you've lost ownership of part of the book.

Excellent.

That's what you want.

And the blub gives you somewhere to play. Stretch it. Sink it. Make it miserable, then make it ridiculous. One parent describes their one-year-old loving "the rhyming patter and the Blub Bluuub Bluuuuuub," which tells you the sound is doing work well before the story is.

I also like the central question more than I expected to.

Mr. Fish believes his face determines his personality.

I look gloomy, therefore I am gloomy, therefore I shall distribute gloom throughout the neighborhood.

That's a genuinely interesting thing to put in front of a preschooler. Are you stuck being the person everybody thinks you are? Can your mood change? Can the way you see yourself change?

Good questions.

Now.

The kiss.

I'm not going to tiptoe past it, because plenty of readers don't either, and neither did the professional reviewers at the time.

A stranger swims up and kisses Mr. Fish without asking. Then Mr. Fish starts kissing everybody else.

Here's the part I found genuinely surprising. This isn't a modern reconsideration. Kirkus flagged it when the book came out in 2008. They called the turn "rather unpalatable," described Mr. Fish going on to "smooch every creature in sight," and added a line I have not stopped thinking about:

"Don't try this at school, kids, you'll get suspended!"

And in the same review they granted the book "plenty of charm."

Which is about where I land.

It doesn't make the book unusable. It gives the grown-up reading it a job.

You can enjoy the rhyme, the voices, the faces, the repetition, and the ridiculous blubbing, and still say afterward, "Hey. Should we ask before kissing somebody?"

That isn't ruining storytime.

That's noticing what you just read.

There's a second objection I'd never considered until I went looking, and I think it might be the sharper one. Several readers aren't bothered by the kiss so much as by everything before it. An entire ocean of acquaintances lines up to tell a sad guy to smile.

One reader put it as bluntly as it can be put: this is "a children's book version of 'Hey gorgeous, why don't you smile more?'"

Hard to unsee.

Also worth a conversation, and a more useful one than the kiss, because a kid is far likelier to be on the receiving end of "why are you so quiet, smile!" than of an uninvited fish.

Readit's Review

I like the blubs.

You have to do them correctly.

You cannot just say:

Blub. Blub. Blub.

No.

The last one has to be BIG.

Also, the squid is kind of rude.

Everybody keeps swimming up to Mr. Fish and telling him what is wrong with his face.

What if that's just his face?

Leave his face alone.

I like all the sea creatures because some of them look really weird.

Mr. Fish looks like somebody told him there are no snacks left.

Then the shiny fish kisses him.

I did NOT know she was going to do that.

She should have asked.

If a strange fish swam up and kissed me, I would swim backward extremely fast.

But I like that Mr. Fish figures out he doesn't have to be gloomy forever.

I just think he could figure that out without kissing the entire ocean.

That's a lot of fish.

What Others Think

Readers have strong feelings about Mr. Fish. Goodreads shows 4.33 out of 5 from 18,034 ratings, with about 1,365 written reviews, and those reviews are a genuine argument rather than a pile of agreement.

The praise is easy to find and consistent. Lanica, who reads to twin boys every night, said it "passed the twins test and will have to be purchased for our home library. It's sing-songy and has a repeated refrain which the boys love, and the pictures are active enough" to keep them looking instead of reaching to turn the page.

Lee Klein calls it "so rhythmic it reads itself" and singles out both "a kaleidoscope of mope" and the smooching finale. Michelle Olson: "Gosh I love this book. It's short, simple, fun to read, and the illustrations are adorable." Kathy found it useful for something else entirely, calling it a "good story to introduce handling depression to little ones." And Lorilai Borror delivered the shortest review on the page: "He's so me bro."

Then there's the other half of the page, and it is not a handful of cranks.

Davis: "The Kiss-Kiss Fish needs to have a refresher course on consent before I read this book again."

Samantha: "It was pretty cute, but I also had some consent questions for the kissing fish. You can't just go around kissing grumpy people."

Andréa objects to both halves: "Don't go around telling other people to smile. It's none of your business and it's rude," then the fish "randomly kissing other" fish, unprovoked.

Jerzy, whose one-year-old loves the blubs, applies a test worth borrowing: "If you imagine swapping the gender roles, it is CREEPY."

That's five independent readers on the first page of reviews, plus Kirkus in 2008. Whatever you conclude, it isn't a fringe reaction and it didn't arrive recently.

My favorite review of the whole set belongs to Anne, who plays it completely straight: "The Pout-Pout Fish is a hauntingly realistic portrayal of one fish's journey through depression and self-loathing." She then notes that his well-meaning friends offer advice like "turn that frown upside down," and that it goes unheeded.

Which, joking aside, is a fair description of the plot.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

Not because Mr. Fish is firing jokes at us.

He's barely firing enthusiasm.

The laughs come from sound, repetition, ridiculous language, those enormous underwater expressions, and whatever the reader is willing to commit to.

The blubs alone can get a room going.

Hanna's sea creatures give you plenty to look at while Diesen keeps the rhyme moving forward.

It's the kind of funny that gets better when the grown-up commits.

No timid blubs.

Four out of five.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd recommend The Pout-Pout Fish most strongly for ages 3 to 6, which is where the publisher puts it.

It's particularly good for kids who love rhyme, repetition, silly voices, sea creatures, and books where they can start joining in before the grown-up reaches the end.

Diesen gives the reader language that's fun to say. Hanna gives Mr. Fish a face kids won't forget.

Would I read it without talking about the ending?

Probably not.

But I wouldn't throw the whole fish back either, and I'd be careful about which conversation I had. The kiss is the one everybody argues about. The one that'll actually come up in your kid's life is the other one.

Should somebody have asked Mr. Fish first?

Is it okay to tell somebody to smile?

Can a person be sad without everybody immediately trying to fix them?

Can you change how you see yourself without somebody else changing you for you?

Those questions make the book more interesting, not less.

And once you've finished discussing the emotional life and kissing policies of underwater wildlife, you're still going to have a kid walking around the house going:

Blub.

Blub.

BLUUUUUB.

That's the part Deborah Diesen absolutely nailed.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit