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The Light Jar by Lisa Thompson (review)

Cicadas get no respect, especially not this slightly rumpled, gray-suited bug, who has been doing data entry faithfully for seventeen years in a similarly gray office building, where his broad green head and prominent, wideset eyes are the only spot of color. Despite his admirable track record—“No sick day. No mistake”—he’s been denied promotion, he’s not allowed in the office bathroom, they dock his pay when he goes downtown, and his human coworkers abuse him. He can’t even afford rent, so he lives in the office wall space, dejectedly munching leaves. When his retirement after seventeen years meets with no fanfare other than a request that he clean his desk, he trudges to the top of the building and stands on the edge of the roof, where the hinted-at pending tragedy takes an expected/unexpected turn as he sheds his exoskeleton for a winged vermilion body and takes to glorious flight with his fellow cicadas. The comic whimsy of Tan’s illustrations, as well as the grumpy little utterances that work as poetic stanzas, rendered in a cicada dialect and ending with the refrain “Tok Tok Tok!,” go far to offset the gloom of this tale of punch-clock bureaucratic sameness and lack of appreciation. That ironic artistry, and the ending with its touch of schadenfreude-ish glee (“Cicada all fly back to forest./ Sometimes thinks about human./ Can’t stop laughing./ Tok Tok Tok!”) sell the multivalent theme—readers may never look at cicadas the same way again, but bored students stuck in stuffy classrooms will surely catch the larger metaphor. And yes, it’s a kid’s book, sure, but just as suited for a retiree set free from his or her cubicle. KC