Don't Look Back! Nothing Ever Happens At the North Pole by Stan and Jan Berenstain



IT’S A BOOK!
A BOOK FOR ME!

I CANNOT WAIT.
TO START MY BOOK.
SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN.
ALL I HAVE TO DO IS LOOK!

SOMETHING HAPPENS
EVERYDAY.
WRITE IT DOWN
RIGHT AWAY!

When a little penguin finds a pristine journa addressed to him in his daily mail, he has to hurry into his scarf and earmuffs and hit the snowscape outside, looking for something interesting to record.

Making tracks across the snow cover, pencil at the ready, he looks for newsworthy events. He trudges up a steep slope, oblivious to the hungry white wolves closing in on him from the rear. What can he write about in this barren view?

A GIANT SNOWBALL
THAT WENT ROUND AND ROUND
AND SMASHED SOME BADDIES
INTO THE GROUND!

But the penguin rejects his snowball, obviously made of inferior snow, and tosses it behind him without a backward look, where, in a scene reminiscent of The Bears' Christmas, it snowballs back down the slope carrying the baddie wolves to a catastrophic crash below.

This device is repeated as the penguin presses forward, still looking for something memorable, trudging over lumpy, sleeping polar bears, who are aroused and angry in his wake.. He hops across ice floes, oblivious to the fact that one of his stepping stones is the head of a testy (and well-tusked) walrus, who chomps down on a floe just as the penquin leaps to land. Finding nothing worth reporting, our little journalist goes under the sea, where he mistakes a waiting whale’s eye for one of the ubiquitous snails on rocks, and surfaces just in time to miss being swallowed whole, still disgusted with his unimpressive environment.

I MUST WRITE SOMETHING!
IT’S ALMOST NIGHT!
THERE’S JUST ONE THING
FOR ME TO WRITE.

IT’S THE ONLY THING
I CAN SAY–
NOTHING HAPPENED
HERE TODAY!

It’s an object lesson in dramatic irony for early readers in Michael and Jan Berenstain’s Nothing Ever Happens at the South Pole (Scholastic, 2012), as the would-be writer, oblivious to everything but what is right in front of his nose, slogs on in search of hot news. The back story of this familiar-sounding but newly published Stan and Jan Berenstain effort is that the manuscript for this book was to be the duo’s second-ever book, but was pushed back by the roaring success of their initial Berenstain Bear title and waited in the archive of the Berenstain basement until, after Stan’s death, Jan and son Mike resurrected and re-worked the original. Fans of the Berenstain Bears will find the typical quatrains less than lyrical but somehow rhythmically reassuring, a quality which made their classic I-Can-Read books so appealing to emergent readers. There’s a rewarding chuckle on each page read as the little penguin returns in disgust to his igloo while all heck breaks out in his wake, making this snowy blast from the past deserving of a warm snow season story hour.

This book has great possibilities as an introduction to journalling for primary students. And for a double dose of dramatic irony, pair this one with the classic Caldecott-winning Ellen Raskin’s Nothing Ever Happens on My Block for a storytime illustrating a similar theme and a similarly oblivious narrator with a very different illustrative style, a literary lesson along with the laughs.