Description
Alonso Núnez’s playful story, Dave Morrison’s rollicking Spanish-to-English translation, and Bruna Assis Brasil’s imaginative illustrations offer a doomsday vision of a child’s first day of school that any young reader will recognize.
Zombies, monsters, and dragons stalk this book’s pages. Cries of despair echo through them. Prisons and dungeons lie in wait. Is this a nightmare? Is it an apocalypse? Well, yes—because it’s the day before our narrator’s first day of school, and all entreaties to his mother are falling on deaf ears. Why should he go to school when he already knows two letters, “N” and “O,” and he knows they spell NO!, which is exactly the word this occasion demands? Why aren’t these magic letters working anymore?
Lexile Level 490; F&P Level L
Reviews
"A child’s imagination inflates school fears in Mexico-based author Núñez’s first English-language book...In sophisticated pen-and-ink and photographic collages, Brazilian illustrator Brasil renders the teacher as a hydra and the school bus as a horned monster, and sharp-featured students wear expressions of wide-mouthed terror...Núñez is effective at conveying the sense of doom that ruminating on the unknown can bring, while Brasil’s art blends creaturely details and photographic accents to stylized effect." — PW
"A boy walks readers through his concerns about his first day of school: "Now I'm in the belly / of this monstrous bus. / The driver's a zombie / who won't talk to us." The story follows the expected school-isn't-so-bad path, and the rhymes (translated from the Spanish) drop the odd beat, but elevating the affair is the surrealism-tinged art reflecting the kid's imagination." — Nell Beram, The Horn Book Guide
