Donkeys Can't Take Bubble Baths! by Pragya Tomar

Hey, Story Seekers!

Unicorn is taking a bubble bath.

Warm water. Good soap. Eyes closed. Sparkle.

Then Donkey walks in.

Donkey has not had a bath since the last time it rained, and it has not rained in a month.

I believe we've identified the problem.

We're exploring Donkeys Can't Take Bubble Baths!, words by Pragya Tomar, pictures by Ramona Maclean.

Readit went straight to the heart of it.

"Donkey smells."

There it is.

Book Breakdown

The cover does almost all the work of explaining this book, so start there.

Unicorn is in a clawfoot tub, eyes shut, blissful, pink and sparkling.

Donkey is leaning in from the right side of the frame. He has a few teeth missing, a mud-colored coat, and, crucially, his own flies. Ramona Maclean drew the smell. You can see it orbiting his head.

His speech bubble says: "Really?"

And in the bottom corner, an orange cat is lying on the floor blowing bubbles through a straw into a bowl, entirely uninvolved.

Over on the right, out of everybody's eyeline, there's a mud puddle.

That puddle is not there by accident. Chekhov would be proud.

The story is exactly what the cover promises. Unicorn likes things clean. Donkey has not made cleanliness a priority in his life. Unicorn is enjoying a luxurious soak when Donkey wanders over and gets curious, because the bubbles smell good and the water is the right temperature.

Unicorn spots one immediate difficulty.

Donkey is filthy.

Also the tub was not built for two large hoofed animals, one of whom is magical and one of whom is emphatically not.

None of this stops Donkey. Things get messy. Then muddy. Then considerably worse than muddy.

And here's the turn that saves it from being a one-joke book: neither friend has to become the other. Donkey gets to try something new. Unicorn gets dragged somewhere she'd never have chosen and finds out it's fun.

The whole thing is laid out in comic-book style, with speech bubbles and short bursts of text rather than paragraphs, which matters for who this suits.

And then there are the cats.

They don't drive the plot. They just watch. Readers single them out constantly, because while the main characters are busy destroying bath time, there's a cat in the corner with an expression that says: are you seeing this?

That's my favorite kind of illustrator contribution. The words tell you what Donkey is doing. The pictures give somebody else a reaction to it.

For teachers and librarians: PenMagic Books, 2020. This is book one of the Unicorn and Donkey series.

No reading levels here. I searched for Lexile, ATOS, Guided Reading and AR data and found nothing reliable for this title, so I'm not inventing any. The comic-book layout means less text per page than the page count suggests.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Opposites are the oldest engine in comedy, and this book runs on the cleanest version of it.

Neat one. Messy one. Put them in the same small space and you don't need a plot, because the audience already knows something is about to go wrong.

A bubble bath is a particularly good choice for it. A bath is supposed to be peaceful. That's the expectation you get to destroy, and the destruction is visible, which is the important part.

But the thing I like most is that the book doesn't leave Donkey as the irritating friend Unicorn has to put up with.

Donkey brings something. He's willing to try things. He's willing to make a mess. He can turn a perfectly proper situation into a game.

Unicorn brings something too.

Different isn't the problem. That distinction matters with kids.

We tell children to accept differences, which sounds lovely and floats straight past them because it's an abstraction. Show them a spotless unicorn trying to share a tub with a donkey who has visible flies and now they can see the problem.

Would you let him in?

Would you try what Donkey likes?

Does being friends mean liking all the same things?

Those are better questions than anything a moral at the end could deliver, and you can ask them without turning bath time into a seminar.

It's still a donkey wrecking a bubble bath. Let's keep our priorities in order.

Readit's Review

I have several questions.

Uh-oh.

"First. How dirty was Donkey?"

Pretty dirty.

"Like dirt dirty?"

Yes.

"Or smell dirty?"

Readit.

"Because one of those is worse."

There are flies on the cover.

"Oh no."

Yes.

"He brought his own flies."

He did.

"I like Donkey."

Of course you do.

"He tries stuff."

True.

"Also Unicorn needs a bigger bathtub."

That's your takeaway?

"And the cats."

What about them?

"They know."

Know what?

"Everything."

I don't think the cats know everything.

"They know Donkey is about to ruin the bath."

Okay. They know one thing.

"That was the important thing."

What Others Think

This is the widest gap in the whole new queue, and it's the most interesting one yet.

Goodreads has it at 4.28 out of 5 from 166 ratings and 23 reviews. That's a tiny sample. Some of the books we reviewed this week have sixty thousand.

KidTime StoryTime's read-aloud has 6.7 million views and 9,800 likes. On a channel with 1.21 million subscribers, that one video pulled more than five times the entire subscriber count.

Six point seven million views. A hundred and sixty-six ratings.

Normally I'd have to guess at why. This time a reader explained it for me.

Theresa wrote that watching the YouTube reading genuinely added to the book for her, because the performer "really focuses on the aspects of images." The one detail she names? "One thing she focused on was the silent cats reaction."

That's the answer, and it's a real lesson about this kind of book.

The comedy here is almost entirely visual. The text is short, the layout is comic panels, and the jokes are in the faces, the flies, the cat in the corner and the mud puddle waiting off to the side.

A book like that doesn't get multiplied by more words. It gets multiplied by somebody who knows where to point.

Which is also the instruction for reading it at home. Slow down and point at things. The text will not take long. The pictures are the show.

Courtney B. Dunlap gets at the same quality from the other direction: "This book really made me laugh... So much was said without many words."

Another reader nails the two performances: you can feel "the crazy that is Donkey and the pretentiousness of Unicorn."

Pretentiousness is exactly right, and it's why Unicorn getting muddy is satisfying rather than mean.

The honest criticism comes from Laura, and it's a structural one. She liked the message about trying new things but felt the characters and the problem didn't fit together, wondering why a unicorn and a donkey are friends in the first place, and why Unicorn doesn't simply tell Donkey how she feels instead of getting upset.

That's fair. This book is going for silly first and relationship mechanics a distant second. Eight percent of the (small) rating pool landed at one or two stars, which is higher than you'd expect from a 4.28, so she isn't alone.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

A four, and it's a visual four.

The laughs aren't in lines you could quote. They're in a donkey with his own flies leaning into a unicorn's spa day and asking "Really?"

Then the mess grows, the characters react, a cat quietly witnesses the entire operation, and a perfectly respectable bubble bath loses control of its life.

That enormous KidTime response tells me the setup travels beautifully when performed. The book earns the four on its own, and gains a fifth face in the hands of an adult who'll do the voices and point at the cat.

I'm holding the five back because the comedy isn't relentless and the story is splitting its attention with the friendship lesson.

But the premise is airtight. Donkey. One month. Unicorn's tub.

You know exactly where this is going, and you want to watch it happen.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 7, for kids who like messy humor, unicorns, expressive faces, odd-couple friendships, and stories where somebody walks into a peaceful situation and ruins it. Lovingly.

It's a particularly good pick for a cautious kid, the one who won't try a new food or a new game. Donkey doesn't arrive with a speech about being open-minded. He smells the bubbles, gets curious, and jumps in.

That's a much easier thing for a wary child to swallow than being told to be brave.

The comic-book layout also makes this friendlier than it looks for a new reader working through it alone. Short bursts, speech bubbles, and a picture doing most of the explaining.

Don't come here for a complicated story. That isn't the job. It's a big visual contrast and a mess waiting to happen, and millions of people have cheerfully climbed into the splash zone.

If your kid says books are boring, this one's worth a look for exactly the reason above: the pictures carry it, so nobody has to get through a wall of text to reach the joke. I rounded up fifteen books for reluctant readers here.

The bridge to my own shelf is Petey Perfectpants and the Silly Sock Puppet Problem. Petey wants control. Donkey would regard control as a medical condition. Both books get funnier the moment the character who wanted everything a certain way discovers that chaos has its own plans.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

Bubble bath tonight?

"Sure."

Excellent.

"With a donkey."

No.

"And mud."

Absolutely not.

"Cats?"

Review over.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit