The Dirty Little Boy by Margaret Wise Brown

The Very Dirty Boy by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon) is a newly illustrated version of a vintage story. The whimsical illustrations by Steve Salerno are hilarious, but they do stretch the limits of believability. Everyone knows that sometimes good fiction requires us to suspend our disbelief, and children are good at this. So if you are one of those poor, tormented souls who are hung up on the need for stories to follow good logic, then just stop here.

In this story, a very dirty boy comes in from an afternoon of play begging for a bath. Every mother's dream, right! Wrong. The busy mother (this part I can easily believe), becomes a little bit agitated and sends her child off to watch animals take a bath.

Animals? Really?

So where does the boy go? Straight to the farmyard, where he rolls in the mud with the pigs. And when the little boy comes home dirtier than ever, his mother just can't understand why he didn't come back clean as a whistle.

Maybe it was Margaret Wise Brown's intention to wag a finger at parents who don't give their children regular baths. Maybe this is just a superlatively silly plot device, but the book itself is a lot of fun to read. I for one found it quite amusing.

Brown's books tend to be verbose, like a lot of vintage kid lit, but this book doesn't wash out. My kids squealed with laughter at this very silly story, which is well-paced for reading in a group setting. The graphics have a stylized, vintage appeal, complementing the story by enhancing, certain, erm, details.