Fix This Mess! by Tedd Arnold

Fix This Mess! by Tedd Arnold

Rating: 4 stars

I like books about messes.

Growing up, The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room was one of my favorites.  I must have read it a million times.  I loved the idea of taking a really messy place and organizing the bajeezus out of it!  When Mama freaks out and starts throwing EVERYTHING away and Papa hears the shouting from his workshop and comes in to restore calm and order...  Then, Papa listens to the problem and helps the kids work towards a solution that involves well-labeled boxes and a cool peg board and a snazzy toy chest.  All of the illustrations in this book make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

Note: I loved the IDEA of taking a really messy place and organizing the bajeezus out of it. I still love the IDEA of it.  But...actually doing it is a totally different thing.  One step in any room in my house and you will get exactly what I mean.  (I really, really, REALLY hope that you are nodding an empathetic nod while glancing around YOUR messy house rather than looking down on messy me from your perfectly clean and orderly abode!)

I LOVE this book, these illustrations,
how cheerfully they organized everything!

So this very simple, very funny, very easy-reader-y book was right up my alley.

And all my kids love Tedd Arnold's Fly Guy books with the funny, bug-eyed characters who are wonderfully silly and creative and nice.  So, when we saw this new book on the New Book shelf at the library, one of us grabbed it.  (I can't remember which one of us--we all grab a lot of books.)  We read it over dinner that same day.

Jake receives Robug (a robot that cleans) in the mail.  He turns it on, points to a chair covered with a whole lot of junk, and tells it, "Fix this mess!" Robug replies "I will fix this mess!" as his arms move impressively quickly, smoke clouds around his action.  When he's finished, the chair is clean.  But the TV now has a whole lot of junk--wait a minute, it's the SAME whole lot of junk!!--on it.  Jake repeats his order, Robug repeats his cleaning (which is just moving the mess...ah, this is my kind of cleaning...)  The whole lot of junk moves from room to room: into the bathtub and even onto the roof!  (Enter lots of kid giggles here.)

Finally, Jake himself cleans it all up.

"Jake missed a spot," Robug points out on the last page.

Fly Guy vs the Flyswatter by Tedd Arnold

Fly Guy vs the Flyswatter by Tedd Arnold

Rating: 3.5 stars

Please learn from my mistake: Don't read this book before you take a vacation at the beach, where there are flies aplenty.

In it, Fly Guy takes a field trip to a flyswatter company, where he hides in his buddy Buzz's shirt pocket, afraid for his life.  He cowers even lower when each kid gets their very own flyswatter and happily zips them through the air.  And when a robotic flyswatter comes out with its swatter arms a-blazin'...Fly Guy almost loses it completely.  His big bug eyes are even bigger, which I didn't think was possible!

Of course he ends up okay, but in the reading of the book I had to explain--or remind--Lorelei and Ben what a flyswatter is, and what it does.  This was all fine and dandy in our fly-free home in Virginia, but...

Flash forward six not-so-bad, the-traffic-gods-were-smiling-on-us hours in the car and we are at the beach, where two annoying flies met us in the kitchen.  I started looking for the flyswatter.  When I found it, Lorelei and Ben looked at me.

"Don't kill Fly Guy!" they said.

Shoot.  Man these kids have good memories.  Too good, really...

So it's Kate vs the Flies after bedtime.

When I read the first book in this series (review here), I was on the fence.  Maybe I'm not ready for the boy humor that will certainly be coming my way with two boys cracking each other up too quickly.  I still think they are a little better than just okay, but I am beginning to see their mass appeal.  The stories are funny; the characters quirky and likable.  There are little "chapters" in the book, so Ben sort of thinks that he's reading a chapter book but since there's an explosion of Magic Treehouse in our house, he understands it's not the real deal.  Still, for a 3 or 4 year old boy (or girl) who has yet to latch onto books, this is worth a try.

Just wait until after the beach for this one!

Buzz Boy and Fly Guy by Tedd Arnold

Buzz Boy and Fly Guy by Tedd Arnold

Rating: 3 stars

Well, good news: this superhero book is not violent.  It is pretty silly, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious.  Maybe it was before the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems taught us what a really funny book was like...  But we've been ruined for life by those great books!  All other silly books are just...a little silly.  Like those cards that are in the "almost funny" category.

Anyway, this is just the first book of eight, and two of the ones we've ordered from the library have won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book award, so...  maybe this first one was a warm up for Tedd Arnold.  I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Here's the story: a boy named Buzz writes a story about himself and his friend, who happens to be a fly.  In his story, he wakes up one day as the same size as his buddy, and finds that both of them are superheroes.  What fun!  They go on a silly adventure where their house was carried off by pirates and placed in a dragon cave (hate it when that happens).  To outsmart the pirates, they move the sleeping dragon, wake him, and use his flames to scare away the pirates.  I like the David and Goliath aspect to this.

The pictures are cute--the duo have enormous eyes and happy faces.  Ben and Lorelei both liked the book, but didn't love it.  I'm curious what the others are like...the rest of them are headed to our local library as I type!