If you happened to have children who were between 2 and 7 in 2000, you knew ''Olivia'' was going to be a big deal because, at birthday parties and on Christmas morning, people kept giving your children copies of it. Among her favorite things: high heels, Degas, accessories, Maria Callas.įalconer's first Olivia book, titled simply ''Olivia,'' appeared in 2000 and became, in that oxymoronic phrase, an instant classic. Olivia pops off the page as if she's just had a ''Queer Eye for the Straight Pig'' makeover - she's part Babe, part Liza Minnelli, hear her pipsqueak roar. But Olivia resembles Eloise in both her fits of pique and her embryonic sense of chic. Unlike Eloise, Olivia doesn't stride through the Plaza Hotel like a pint-size Patton she lives instead with her family in a tidy Manhattan apartment. Olivia is a 6-year-old diva-in-training, and she's clearly been minted in the Eloise mold. You just flunked pizazz.'' Thirty years later, the best-known pizazz machine in the children's-book world is Ian Falconer, the creator of Olivia, a little pig with arty inclinations and a big-as-Lincoln Center personality. ''IF you don't know who Kay Thompson is,'' Rex Reed drawled in a 1972 Harper's Bazaar profile of the writer of the picture book ''Eloise,'' ''please turn the page.
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