My Worst Book Ever

Book excerpt: A book about all the things that can go wrong when you try to write one, by the picture-book dream team that produced The Pencil and Hooray for Bread 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.