Eastman and the Berenstains to help continue his specific brand of easy reading). Seuss (though he was clever enough to rope in fellow artists like P.D. What’s a little less clear is the story after that. Seuss to came along and blow those boring old books out of the water with his own specific brand of humor and short words. Now I think we’re all familiar with the story of how the Dick and Jane books conquered this market, allowing Dr. If you see a book that is approximately nine inches tall and six and a half inches wide, that book was written with beginning readers in mind. This job is so important that over the years publishers have taken pains to make these books a specific size and shape. It is created, specifically, to teach children how to read. The beginner book (sometimes called the easy book) is the rare children’s literature format with a specific job in mind. One minute he’s being mistaken for a cat by the name of Baby Cakes, the next he’s outwitting a snake, and then finally he’s going directly against the book’s direction to establish a kind of doggish independence. I am a dog.” So begins the first of three tiny stories that show a push-and-pull kind of relationship between a dog and the narration that accompanies him. Come again? As the dog in this book is quick to assure you, “I am not a cat.

Okay, I don’t like it when books break down the fourth wall anymore, but we can let one last one squeeze on through.

However it is also so funny that it literally had me chortling and chuckling and having a magnificent time the whole way through. It does all that stuff that bugs me, like talking directly to the readers, intrusive narrators, etc. That said, when was the last time you saw a really good, really well written beginner book? They’re hard to do, and harder still to make amusing. So something like We Are In a Book by Mo Willems (again) will generally work. I suspect that this is because they have so many more limitations put on them than picture books proper. Easy books aren’t remiss from this either, they just do it better. For every book that breaks down the fourth wall with cleverness and aplomb (think: Press Here by Herve Tullet) there are untold hoards of imitators making a mess of things. Naturally most of the fault for this falls on Mo Willems and his irascible pigeon, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. Was it you? Don’t tell me to calm down either because I have a perfect right to be angry about this! Have you even SEEN the picture books coming out in the last 20 years? It’s like The Monster at the End of this Book went from cute novelty to Biblical text. Okay that’s it, that’s it, that is IT! Whose bloody idea was it to break down the fourth wall in the first place? Seriously, show me the person.

Moo book by david larochelle