This book tells the story of Herb a little boy who loves reading. One night when his friend is sleeping over he beings reading a very old book of fairy tales that he hadn't seen in a while. He falls asleep reading the book and is taken into the story. But throughout the years, Herb had made changes to the books pages, ripping pages out, drawing extra things on the pages. so when he is living through the stories they are all very mad at him because they can't finish their story the way it was supposed to be. So when Herb is finally back in his room awake, he tries to fix the changes he has made to his book of fairy tales. ( )

A boy who loves books but has not always treated them well falls asleep and finds himself in his book of fairy tales, where his interaction with everyone from Goldilocks to Cinderella wreaks havoc.

Gives excellent reasons not to disfigure one's books. Ha-ha! ( )

Summary: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book is about a little boy named Herb who falls into a book that he has mistreated (town pages out of, spilled peas on), and he is visited by various fairy tale creates who are upset with him- such as Goldilocks (who is mad he is ruining her story), and Cinderella, who is made that her Prince Charming has been cut out of the book (not to mention the Queen who now has a mustache due to his doodling). Herb eventually works to make things right for all of the characters. This book has vibrant illustrations, changing text size, page flaps, demands to be flipped to be read, holes in the pages- and a TON of other multimodal elements.

Personal Connection: I enjoyed reading this as an adult, and seeing all of the parallels to fairy tales. However, it was at times hard to follow and some WORK to read this text! I am not sure how easy it would be to read to a crowd of children (hard to follow) but I loved looking deeply at the illustrations to see all of the different uses of color, media, and texts.

Extras:
**Mentioned in class- multimodal text. Presentation as well!
-Lauren Childs interview about illustrating: https://www.teachingbooks.net/author_collection.cgi?id=8&mid=15
-> draws a thick line, blows it up- likes the grainy feel, combines photography, wallpaper - "one flat thing on top of another." Fond of fairy tales- loves to twist fairy stories.

Application to teaching: Excellent for teaching how to take care of our books in the beginning of the year, applicable to fairy tales unit as well. Excellent for teaching a new kind of illustrating- layering kinds of paper, photographs, illustrations, as well as multimodal text- how does it convey different feelings and emotions? What kind of voice would you read it in? Can be difficult to follow- not optimal for independent reading. ( )

This book is about a boy that loves books (although he can't read very well). He ends up falling asleep while reading a book and wakes up to find himself in the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He realizes that he is actually in his book of fairytales and tries to escape. Along the way, he realizes that a year prior, he had drawn all over some of the characters faces and cut some things out of the book. Because of that, many of the characters in the book were very upset and many of the storylines were ruined due to lack of characters. Eventually, he makes it out of the book and goes back and fixes everything he messed up. Although Lauren Chidl tends to make her illustrations and word font match the context of the book, this one was a little distracting. I found myself turning the book upside down multiple times on one page. This book would be good to teach kids to respect and not to draw on, eat, or play roughly with books. Overall it was cute, but the illustrations distracted us from the message the story was trying to tell. ( )