Raining Jelly on the Parade: A Perfectly Messed-Up Story by Patrick McDonnel

ONCE UPON A TIME, LITTLE LOUIE WENT SKIPPING MERRILY ALONG.

"TRA LA LA LA LA" HE SANG.

LOUIE KNEW EVERYTHING WAS JUST... "HEY!"

WHAT WAS THAT?

Little Louie is skipping through a meadow in his own story, when somebody drops a blob of... JELLY(?) right on his own story. He licks it. Yep, it's jelly. What the....?

Then a blob of peanut butter lands on his head. Who's so rude as to eat a peanut butter (the chunky kind!) and jelly sandwich while reading his story? Hey!

Then sooty fingerprints appear all over his page, and with the next page turn there is an orange juice ring all over the nice white background ARG! And now someone is scribbling with crayon between the words!

"MY STORY IS GETTING ALL MESSED UP!

YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!"

The joy of opening your very own story book all laid out on nice clean pages is spoiled. Who can read a book that is all messed up?

Patrick McDonnell joins the crowd of author-illustrators in his interactive metafiction, A Perfectly Messed-Up Story (Little, Brown and Company, 2014), in which Little Louie learns a life lesson. STUFF HAPPENS. Life gets messy, and yet your story can still be pretty good if you keep on singing. Little Louie, with his big eyes and new-potato nose , is the perfect protagonist, a stand-in for everyone whose story has not turned out the way it was planned, "The pleasures of watching a book depart from its conventions and address its sticky-fingered reader will tickle even the littlest postmodernist," says the New York Times Book Review.

Pair this one with Drew Daywalt's still best-selling The Day the Crayons Quit (see review here).