Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow? HAIR-POCALYPSE! by Geoff Herbach

There's such a thing as too much of a good thing.

For Aidan Allen, it's his hair.

Aidan is one of those guys who hates haircuts and doesn't like anyone to fool with his hair. He mostly leaves it to its own devices.

But today it's a colossal, catastrophic, cataclysmic, apocalyptic, bad-hair day!

Aidan was a grubby kid. His clothes were always wrinkled, his shoes were always untied, and he always seemed to have grass stains on his knees. But none of those was his problem.

The real problem was that Aidan's hair was completely out of control.

It's time for a showdown. Aidan confronts his hair in mirror and commands it to shape up.

Aidan orders it to LIE DOWN. His hair shrugs, wins a battle with his mom's hairbrush, and responds by twisting itself into a series of outrageous hairdos, each one worse than the last, ending with tying itself in bows all over his head.

Aidan has to go off to school, where everyone stares as his hair shapes itself into an airplane, and then an octopus, grabbing the paintbrushes in art. It turns into a raptor, slopping milk all over Noah's pants. It transforms itself from a mass of curls to a long ponytail, a Mohawk, and the world's longest and ugliest mullet. Even for laid-back Aidan, things have finally come to a head!

Back home, Aidan again confronts his hair in the mirror.

"Why are you doing this? What do you want?"

And his errant locks reply--in hairy cursive: "WASH ME!"

Aidan works out a compromise with his hair, but his shoelaces are still another issue, in Geoff Herbach's Hair-pocalypse (Capstone Young Readers) (Capstone Books, 2017). Any of us who have ever struggled with hair that seems to have it in for us (and who hasn't?) will empathize with Aidan Allen. Illustrator Stephen Gilpen does most of the stylin' here in his wildly comic illustrations in this hairy tale of out-of-control coiffures in an outrageously silly story! Hair can be, well, "hairy" to deal with, and we might as well get a few giggles out of our daily confrontations with it!

For more hair-raising stories, share this one with Laurie Halse Anderson's Hair of Zoe Fleefenbacher Goes to School (Read review here.)