Dougal the Garbage dump bear by Matt Dray

Tuesday Treasure

I have decided to highlight an older book each Tuesday for the next few months. Many of these will be out of print but you may/should find them in a school library. They are books I enjoyed reading in my school library.

Recently I met a lady who was driving a yellow and black Smart car with the number plate BeeBee.

It made me think of the bee character named Bumble in Dougal the Garbage Dump Bear. I love to quote his lines:

"To bee or to bee."
"As long as we all bee-have ourselves."
"Why can't he just let us bee?"

In my memory Bumble also said "I want to bee a bee." but I seem to have made that one up!

Dougal, the teddy bear, is discarded by his family and finds himself taken to the garbage dump. The workers rescue him and sit him on a bench by the pond. After a few lonely days, Dougal is joined by Bumble and then over time many more soft toys join them including "a shaggy thing with one eye that didn't know what it was." The boss finally arrives and says 45 toys are too many for the dump so the kindly workers take all of them to a cottage by the sea. "They couldn't believe their luck."

I love the little touches of humour in this book along with the extras in the illustrations such as coffee stains, a dead fly and the photo of a spiral binding because this book is designed to look like a photo album.

Dougal the Garbage Dump Bear was shortlisted by the CBC in 2005 in the Early Childhood picture book category. The winner that year was Where is the Green sheep? which is still available in many formats while sadly Dougal the Garbage Dump Bear is out of print although it did reappear as a board book in 2012. If you enjoy controversy, some libraries in the US banned Dougal the Garbage Dump Bear because of these lines:

And some days, mostly on Fridays, they would go out with the men after work and play pool and get home very late.
And always the next day, they would both feel very sick from drinking too many ginger beers, and have to sleep it off in the airconditioned dragon.
'Never again,' Bumble would say.
'I need an iced coffee,' Dougal would say.

I am so pleased to share this quote from the Kirkus reviewer:

The juxtaposition of Dray’s wry narrative with his quixotic and uniquely compelling snapshots proves engaging across the generations. A heartfelt message at tale’s end regarding triumphing over adversity proves that this odd duckling of a story is truly a swan.

Two other treasures which could link with this book are Katherine and the Garbage Dump and Simp (originally published as Cannonball Simp).