The Things I Can Do
Jeff can do lots of things by himself: fix his lunch, mend his toys, brush his teeth, fly (almost). He can even write and illustrate his own picture-book autobiography. Mack throws everything he has into the perfect facsimile of a handmade-by-a-child book, complete with doodled crayon pictures, magazine collage, dinosaur stickers, and even a duct tape spine. The result is a messy metaconcoction with piles of charm. The rhyming-couplet text, outlining the events in Jeff’s day, is suitably childlike, with playful predictability and deliberately questionable scansion. But the real draw is the boisterous, ridiculous imagery, both for its irresistible authenticity and its clever detail (don’t miss the hand-crayoned Roaring Brook logo or the copy of this book on the final page’s Popsicle-stick shelf). It’s tempting to suggest that this will inspire young readers to create memoirs of their own, but that feels unnecessarily earnest. This one is all about the laughter. Preschool-Grade 2. --Thom Barthelmess