LIBRARY BOOKS ARE NOT FOR EATING!

Kids are shocked by their new librarian’s eating habits.

“The day Ms. Bronte came to school, / story time was extra cool,” warbles the collective narrator—except for one “small problem, / couldn’t beat it. / Once she read a book… // SHE’D EAT IT!” Big, irregular die-cut chomps taken out of the cover and endpapers lead to cartoon illustrations featuring a frumpy, bespectacled long-necked dinosaur smilingly wolfing down stacks of generic library volumes. Ms. Bronte then goes on to the school’s other stashes of books as students and grown-ups (diverse in skin color and facial features but all human) look on in wide-eyed dismay. Is it a love of books? Not at all, as Ms. Bronte explains as she packs up to leave: “It’s not that I find books so yummy, / but nothing else here fills my tummy.” Fortunately, she suddenly realizes that the school’s overgrown soccer field, there all along but somehow going unnoticed, is in serious need of weeding…just the ticket for a hungry herbivore. This contrived twist combines with a vague moral about how books are for reading, not eating, to give Tarpley’s addition to the annals of bibliophagy a tentative air—particularly next to more robustly comedic variations on the theme, like Franziska Biermann’s The Fox Who Ate Books, translated by Shelley Tanaka (2016), or Emma Yarlett’s Nibbles stories.

Bland sauce: Others have dished up better.