THE BOY WHO CRIED ROBOTS!

A humorous contemporary twist on the old story of the boy who cried “Wolf!”

On nearly every page of this tale, light-skinned, orange-haired Sam’s rather cavernous mouth gapes open as he laughs loudly at his own lies. His falsehoods start small but rapidly intensify—from his declaration to readers that his bike is yellow (it’s in fact blue) to his claim that a big hairy monster ate his homework to his excuse for not bathing (the tub has been invaded by gators). Sam’s fed-up classmates start avoiding him, and he decides to tell a whopper of a lie so he can stay home from school: “Evil space ROBOTS with fire-shooting eyeballs…are attacking my house!” The very funny result is much lighter—and goofier—than that of Aesop’s traditional fable, but the moral remains. Part of a series intended to “instill confidence and the joy of reading in new readers,” this graphic novel features speech bubbles and bright, funny, frenzied-looking art, giving youngsters plenty of visual help in making sense of the text. The sentences and phrases are short, with random vocabulary words poised to enter a new reader’s collection of sight words. At one point, when Sam’s classmates are rightly annoyed at his fibs, one of them uses the ableist word lame.

A witty and entertaining cautionary tale.