Browsing the Backlist

• written by Doreen Cronin
• illustrated by Harry Bliss
• published by Scholastic and HarperCollins (2003)

If you’re not familiar with this one already, it’s absolutely worth grabbing. It’s the first part of a “trilogy” (the other two are Diary of a Spider and Diary of a Fly).

The book is a series of diary entries written by the titular worm. Each entry is a page or spread and works as a standalone gag/joke. It’s hilarious, and the gags work on several levels — as good humor should.

April 10: It rained all night and the ground was soaked. We spent the entire day on the sidewalk. Hopscotch is a very dangerous game.

Despite the fact that there’s no running narrative, as most picture books have, Zoey never grows tired of this book. The vignettes and standalone gags crack her up each and every time. Harry Bliss’s art is also incredibly detailed, so there’s usually something new to discover on each page.

There are so many lines that Zoey casually brings up in conversations that spring from this book:

• “Mom says I have to stop eating so much garbage right before I go to bed.”
• “Never bother Daddy when he’s eating the newspaper.”
• “Like Mom always says, the earth never forgets we’re here.”

The book has some great underlying messages that I’m more than happy to instill in my kids, too. All three of them do. Be yourself; be a good friend; dream big; creativity will take you far in life. And believe me, these messages are not lost on kids. They get it.

One of the cutest features of the book is that it’s bookended with pages that look like a scrapbook. Little photos or scraps of paper that Worm taped in and then wrote captions for. The level of detail in this book is fantastic, and I wish more children’s books followed suit.

Verdict? A solid A. We own all three books, and I just discovered that there are some “Step Into Reading” books with the same characters. Looks like we’ll be grabbing those, as well.