Tag: breakfast

Posted in picture books, Preschool Reads

Interrupting Chicken wants Cookies for Breakfast!

Posted on by Rosemary Kiladitis

Interrupting Chicken: Cookies for Breakfast, by David Ezra Stein, (Nov. 2021, Candlewick Press), $17.99, ISBN: 9781536207781

Ages 4-8

The third adorable and laugh-out-loud installment of the Interrupting Chicken series is here and ready for cookies. Little Chicken wakes his Papa up, because it’s time for breakfast and he has the perfect idea: cookies! Papa decides that reading nursery rhymes would be a better way to pass the time, and he and Chicken snuggle together as he begins to read. As the rhymes unfold, Chicken finds a way to get his point across, as he shows up in just about every rhyme, figuring out a way to mention cookies while interacting with such nursery rhyme characters as the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe and Jack Be Nimble. Will Papa finally give in and have cookies for breakfast?

This series perfectly captures the spirit of a preschooler: excited, lovable, and single-minded in focus. Chicken has amusing outlooks on life to share with readers: cookies have Vitamin C – for cookie!; the early bird gets the cookie, and nobody likes a cold breakfast (so you sit on the cookies to warm them up). Kids will see themselves in Chicken, and grownups will get a chuckle as they recognize their little ones. Warm colors invite readers into the comfortable space Chicken and Papa share.

Interrupting Chicken: Cookies for Breakfast has a starred review from School Library Journal. Download a free activity kit for the Interrupting Chicken series, courtesy of publisher Candlewick Press.

Posted in Early Reader, Fiction, Fiction, Humor, Intermediate, Preschool Reads

What was your Worst Breakfast?

Posted on by Rosemary Kiladitis

worstbreakfastThe Worst Breakfast, by China Miéville/Illustrated by Zak Smith, (Oct. 2016, Black Sheep/Akashic), $16.95, ISBN: 978-1617754869

Recommended for ages 3-8

Two sisters sit down one morning to talk about the worst breakfast they’ve ever had. It gets progressively worse, from burnt toast, to unbaked, uncooked, unclean baked beans, a steaming, slick tomato hill oozing into rancid swill. Can it get worse? It has to get better… doesn’t it?

This book is just too much fun to read by yourself or a room full of kids, who will squeal with awful glee as the awful breakfast the two sisters describe gets grosser and grosser. Award-winning author China Miéville, best known for his fantasy and science fiction tales, is brilliant as he constructs a hilarious, rhyming tale, told as a conversation between two sisters remembering the worst breakfast ever made. Building on each other’s memory, the sisters one-upping each other and – illustrated in full repulsive glory by Zak Smith – create a mountain of food so terrifying and awful that you have no choice but to squeal and giggle uncontrollably at memories of terrible meals past. And then… a glimmer of hope? Maybe breakfast can be saved, after all.

I love this book. I hope Miéville and Smith have more stories to tell, because this will be a storytime mainstay for me. This would be great for a food storytime. Pair this one with Kate McMullan’s I Stink!, where a garbage truck narrates a stomach-churning alphabet of the “food” he eats on his shift. I’d also pair this with Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen for a surrealist story session; I was reminded of Sendak’s book often as I read The Worst Breakfast. I enjoyed the back and forth between the sisters, and the different British-American references, like the differences in the pronunciation of words  like tomato and bravado: “You can’t rhyme TOMATO and BRAVADO!” “I can if we’re English. Almost. Tu-MAH-toe, bruh-VAH-doe.” I love the pictures that Miéville paints with his words and Zak Smith’s wild interpretations that give the words life on the page.

worstbreakfast_4

This is a fun tale that’s sure to get the kids interacting during a storytime. If you’ve got readers who enjoy gross humor – and who doesn’t? – this will build their vocabularies and make them howl with disgusted delight. The Worst Breakfast has received a starred review from Kirkus.