bilbopooh's Full Review: Shel Silverstein - The Missing Piece Meets the Big...
In The Missing Piece Shel Silverstein, best known for his poetry, introduced a simple-looking character on a mission. It was a large circle with one wedge missing, and the object, which looked a lot like the Zoloft mascot, rolled along slowly, diligently seeking its missing piece. In The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, we see the other side of the coin. For every circle looking for a missing piece, there's a piece looking for a circle. And instead of traversing the countryside, the lot of a missing piece is to sit and wait to be found.
Like its predecessor, this book seems like a comment on marriage, with the circle the woman and the piece the man, or maybe the other way around. There are many inappropriate partners - or partners the piece doesn't treat properly. It pops one circle: heartbreak. Another puts it on a pedestal, expecting of it things it can't live up to. A circle with too many missing pieces has a long list of exes. Some circles are paired to each other and don't notice the piece at all, which seems to be indicative of a homosexual relationship. And one circle accepts the piece but can no longer accommodate it once the piece grows, which rings true of many couples that can't deal with the idea that their spouses change over time.
Of course, maybe none of this is really meant to deal with marriage at all. That's just what it seems like to me. At any rate, it's about searching for something - or someone. Feeling as though you need someone else to make you complete and discovering that you can be complete on your own. That's what the piece realizes when it meets a circle that has no missing piece - and no found piece, either. It's just a round circle - a perfect whole. While becoming like that circle requires a long and arduous journey for this triangular entity, it is possible; the more awkward steps it takes, the easier they become.
Both books consists mostly of circles, triangles and circles missing triangles. Thus, the drawings are very simplistic yet distinctly Silverstein's. There are some added props now and then; one page has flowers, one has a telescope, and on one page a square turns up instead of a circle. Always there is a line to indicate the ground. Up to a certain point, every page demonstrates a different type of failure for the missing piece, and Silverstein wastes no words in saying why each arrangement fails to work. Most scenarios get only one sentence. Some get two. The perfect circle is the only other character Silverstein lingers on for long.
The Missing Piece Meets the Big O is a story about independence and self-sufficiency. That's good. But like The Missing Piece, it seems to have a bit of an anti-marriage message, and it's even stronger this time around, since by the end the piece has made itself unsuitable for its world's method of marriage. It can no longer fit with another piece. It can, however, roll side by side with the Big O, so it needn't be lonely. I can't really say which of the books I like better. They both have a certain eloquent simplicity to them and a wide-ranging applicability. I don't like either one as well as The Giving Tree, but both are clever and at least worth some contemplation.
The wedge-shaped hero of The Missing Piece waits in vain for the right someone to appear, until a complete circle (the Big O) shows it how to gather i...More at HotBookSale
The wedge-shaped hero of The Missing Piece waits in vain for the right someone to appear, until a complete circle (the Big O) shows it how to gather i...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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