I admit to being a leeetle unsure of what to make of this one.

In an SLJ interview, author Mac Barnett was less than definitive: "What is The Skunk about? Is it a comedy? A romance? A ghost story? A tale of paranoia? An allegory of trauma?" And the Kirkus review called it "peculiar, perplexing, and persistent — training wheels for Samuel Beckett." I guess I'd add Ionesco as well (that scene at the opera? "Excuse me, madam, but there seems to be a skunk on your head." Pure The Bald Soprano).

But we are here to talk about The Skunk as a Caldecott contender, and that's maybe a little easier. We don't have to know what it's about; we just have to look at how the text and pictures interact to tell the story.

I think artist Patrick McDonnell made a wise choice to keep the palette super-simple and not try to add too many visual bells and whistles to this enigmatic story. The one absolutely necessary role of the pictures here is to link man and skunk — fuse them into one — and McDonnell accomplishes that for sure, through color scheme and attire: both figures are starkly black and white with a spot of red (for the skunk, his nose; for the man; his tuxedo's bowtie); both sport tails, often echoing each other in curl and flip.

On the title page appears a sketch of a realistic-looking skunk, standing on all fours in an implied natural/country setting. For me the contrast between this realistic skunk and the skunk character in the book — who walks on two legs and is a bon vivant urbanite — underscores the surrealism of the story that follows and again helps reinforce the connection between man and skunk.

Plus. The Skunk wins the Wittiest Endpapers of the Year contest, hands down. The opening endpapers are vertical black and white blocks of color. The closing endpapers are exactly the same — with the addition of some red triangles, which immediately transform the black and white blocks of color into ... a tuxedo. The whole theme is captured perfectly, and wordlessly.

What do people think of the abrupt change in palette — to bright, cheery primary colors without a hint of the noir that has thus far permeated the book — after the man moves to a new part of the city? I think it would have made more sense thematically to change the palette as soon as he emerges from underground, since once he gets to the new neighborhood he is no longer stalked by the skunk. But I guess that would have stolen the drama from the "when I opened my bedroom door, guess who was waiting there for me?" page-turn...

Thoughts on this droll, perplexing book? (And ... are we looking at it? Or is it looking at us? Aaaaaaaaahh!)