by Allan Ahlberg (Author) Bruce Ingman (Illustrator)
Picture books are such good fun and so is making them-- but who knew there were so many things that could go wrong? This is the story of a picture book doomed from the very start. Allan has a good idea for a book about a crocodile, but every time he sits down to write, he's interrupted. The manuscript gets soaked in coffee, nibbled by snails, and when Bruce gets started on the pictures, he gets overexcited and draws a hippo, not a crocodile, at which point the publishers get overexcited too--they want a dinosaur and experiment with all kinds of different fonts. Allan and Bruce finally think they've straightened things out, when the book goes off to the printer and--you guessed it--the trouble really starts. My Worst Book Ever is a clever and amusing introduction to the process of writing books for children, and they--along with their parents--will be delighted to see how hilariously wrong Allan and Bruce's book turns out.
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Ahlberg and Ingman (Hooray for Bread) continue their comic streak with a memoir of sorts about bookmaking gone wrong. Addressing readers as if they're right there with him, Ahlberg lays out the catastrophe. While his story about a crocodile pleases him ("Billy Brown boating/ Brave little chap/ Crocodile floating/ Crocodile... Snap!") his drawings get smudged and stained; Bruce, his illustrator, lobbies for a hippo instead of a crocodile. Worst of all, Lucy--his printer's four-year-old daughter--rearranges the book's pages to her liking before they are bound. Her handiwork is revealed in a grand and ambitious gatefold, with the book as Ahlberg intended it on the left and Lucy's version on the right. Pages are upside down, a hippo intrudes, and one page is in Chinese. Ahlberg's confiding, self-deprecating tone provides smiles for anyone who has wrestled with the creative process ("I was gripping my pencil so hard I had to go up to the house and have a chocolate biscuit to calm me down"). It's an entertaining sketch of how books get made and sometimes veer off course. Ages 5-up. (Apr.)
Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.
In this (presumably) made-up account, a promising picture-book project falls afoul of a series of aggravating mishaps... Glimpses of a writer's life, with an engaging bid for sympathy at the travails thereof. -Kirkus Reviews