The book is titled Hunches in Bunches, but it is not really about hunches. What the protagonist is facing is a series of decisions. "Decisions in Bunches" does not have quite the same ring to it, however, does it? It is a rhyming book and so the decision to create a rhyme for the title makes sense, but that may be where the sense ends. The truth of the matter is that in going for a rhyming title, Dr. Seuss sacrificed a point of creativity. The facts are these: the Hunches just don’t really have that magic that readers have come to expect from the author.
Even though the Hunches present an outrageous and imaginative physicality with the giant hands affixed to their heads, they really are not individualized enough to make a lasting impact. In the image in which Better Hunch yanks that hat off Homework Hunch’s head, there is nothing to distinguish which is Better and which is Homework other than the text. The visual interpretation of them might as well make their oppositional priorities interchangeable. This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Sam-I-Am and the big guy who doesn’t like green eggs and ham. For that matter, even the little boy lacks personality. There is no flair to his physical features and even more strangely, his reactions to the weirdness taking place around him is almost uniquely homogenized. Most of the time he is pictured in profile and his expressions never seem to change from one page to the next.
Maybe the most un-Seussian thing about Hunches in Bunches—and, clearly, there are man—is the lack of connectivity between the text and the images. Names like Better Hunch, Homework Hunch and Four-Way Hunch are astonishingly mundane for a work by Seuss. Making matters even worse is that the more idiosyncratically named Spookish Hunch, Very Odd Hunch and Sour Hunch lack such idiosyncratic visual design. There is just something slightly off about every aspect of the book. Any one of these lapses by itself would do little to undermine the overall enjoyment, but when combined together, the effect comes very close—precariously close—to making Hunches in Bunches seem like a project contracted out to a ghostwriter on which the name Dr. Seuss was slapped across the cover without benefit of any other association.
That is not the case, of course. The book is Dr. Seuss and it does serve a worthwhile purpose within his canon: teaching kids a lesson about prioritizing a list of things they want to do and things they have to do in order to approach them in a responsible manner. Such a lesson is not one found often in children’s books written for this age level, so that is a good thing. Too bad that Seuss could not have dug down a little deeper and found a more entertaining way of demonstrating the value of that lesson.
