OOPS

This book is quite clever and well thought-out, with many nice, off-beat details, such as the (puzzling, not to say disturbing) framed portrait of a man on the wall (disturbing, since the house belongs to a family of pigs), whose man's facial expression changes in reaction to the occurrences. The depicted domino effect appears to me quite feasible physically. This helps maintain the reader's involvement and interest. There are just a couple teeny weeny problems with this picture story. 1. The pictures. I'm afraid there's no easy way to break it (and i don't mean just the piggies' house): the pictures are just plain ugly. No, the word ugly does them justice, they're just so... oh, i don't know, inadequate? It's the unintentionally distorted perspective, the amateurish pen strokes, the milk that looks like flour, the revolving chainsaw that looks like a pompon, the grotesque incompetence in rendering facial expressions that lends sheer absurdity to scenes that should have been heart-wrenching. 2. The story. It's so obliviously insensitive, it's hilarious. The following excerpt from the cover flip conveys the attitude well: "They say you shouldn't cry over spilled milk, but what if it destroys your whole house?" Then again, to paraphrase Mae West, too much of a bad thing is wonderful...

I'm a speech pathologist and use this book for some sessions. Some of the items are hard for language-impaired kids to name; like table saw, electricity line and roller paint tray. However, because these words are hard to find, i've found that this book is a great tool for teaching circumlocution. The concrete cause and effect relationships shown in pictures are nice too.

Arthur Geisert's OOPS provides another wordless picture book story: this revolving around a little milk spill at breakfast, which leads to a series of misadventure chain reactions that eventually disrupt everything. Cause and effect usually doesn't create such disasters from a little drop of milk...or can it?