Your school is the best!

As a little boy gets ready to head off to school, the exuberant, party-crashing cockroach from Your Birthday Was the Best! (2022) crawls into the child's backpack, with a little help from his six-legged extended family. Thoroughly enjoying his classroom visit, the stowaway bug sinks his teeth into a grammar textbook, investigates a peapod science experiment, and plays in pencil shavings. The cockroach's cheery second-person narration comically belies the chaos he creates: "At show-and-tell, I did the best dance ever on your teacher's head. You were so proud. . . you cried. Everyone did!" Sala's watercolor-and-colored-pencil illustrations zoom in on a sweet-faced, bug-eyed insect with waving antennae and pan out to show students jumping on top of tables, with their arms flailing in alarm. When the creepy crawler devours a bunch of crayons and creates an inimitable scatological painting, he sets the art class abuzz. The kooky cockroach's unwavering, happy-go-lucky obliviousness cannot be exterminated, and this picture book offers laughs along with a dose of gross.

Perspective determines perception in this comic clash of human and roach viewpoints. Hutchings' narrator, the confident cockroach introduced in Your Birthday Was the Best! (2022), enthusiastically celebrates a visit to "your" school ("you" being a light-skinned child with short blond hair). Self-assured but supremely un-self-aware, the roach is certain that you would be sad to realize you forgot to bring them along for show and tell, so the crawlie climbs aboard your backpack--with a crowd of family. After they covertly enjoy some fun classroom activities, your big presentation arrives, so the ebullient insect lets loose by dancing on your teacher's head. The ensuing panic is cited as evidence of this performance's success. During a lunchtime game of hide-and-seek, the vermin crawl into your teacher's lunchbox, precipitating her "little rest" (i.e., dead faint). Later, the narrator wants to join you and draw a picture, but the crayons are too heavy to hold, so they eat several colors instead--and then excrete a pile of rainbow pellets. (Kids, don't try this at home.) The bug's final "triumph" is their portrait of you, rendered in the excreted "rainbow paint," which sends the kids screaming from the room but convinces the narrator that such art moves everyone to tears. Sala again provides perfect illustrations: a cheerful elementary classroom with diverse students, a perky individual little face for every roach, and realistic details to reward the inevitable rereading. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Another hilarious outing for the curious cockroach--and readers with strong stomachs. (Picture book. 5-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.