My worst book ever!

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 PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In this (presumably) made-up account, a promising picture-book project falls afoul of a series of aggravating mishaps.Sitting in his tiny writing shed, narrator Ahlberg begins a brilliant narrative ("Little ducks dreaming / Afternoon nap / Riverbank steaming / Crocodile / Snap!"). Alas, this proceeds to be splashed with spilled coffee, put on hold in the heat of composition by a family vacation, eaten by garden snails, and finally delivered to illustrator "Bruce"who unilaterally decides to draw hippos because there are "too many crocodile books." Then the editor wants to make changes too; an overeager designer must be likewise quelled; and the printer's young daughter decides to "tidy up" the loose pages. The author mournfully offers on one side of a double gatefold his original vision ("Not Roald Dahl, of course, or Julia Donaldson even, but not bad") and on the other, a spread-by-spread layout of the jumbled result, complete with changing typefaces, random sketches, mismatched orientations, sudden shifts to French and then Chinese, and a small chocolate handprint. His mild "Oh dear" at the end of this chain of calamities signals his intent to deliver a mild ribbing rather than vengeful slashing to his collaborators over the years. "Anyway, mustn't grumble," he writes midcourse. "That's how a book gets made, after all. Teamwork." The informal illustrations help to make light of the episode. Ingman's nearly all-white cast inadvertently reinforces current criticisms of the industry.Glimpses of a writer's life, with an engaging bid for sympathy at the travails thereof. (Picture book. 7-9, adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.