Don't Touch This Book! by Bill Cotter

Hey, Story Seekers!

Today's book has one rule.

Don't touch it.

That seems manageable. We've handled books with far more complicated instructions. Surely we can sit here for a few minutes and keep our hands to ourselves.

Except there's a monster named Larry holding the book.

And Larry keeps looking at us.

And the book is right there.

Readit?

"I'm touching it."

Of course you are.

We're exploring Don't Touch This Book!, written and illustrated by Bill Cotter.

Book Breakdown

Start with the cover, because Cotter is already playing.

The title letters are so enormous that Larry is hiding behind them. His eyes look out at you from between the two O's in BOOK, watching to see what you're going to do.

And up in the corner, he's still holding the red button from Don't Push the Button!, the book that started all this.

He hasn't learned a thing.

Inside, Larry is firm at first. No touching. Don't even try it.

Then he weakens.

Fine. One finger.

That one touch changes the page, which makes Larry curious, and from there he's not guarding the book anymore. He's running the experiment.

Now try this. Now try that.

Soon you're not just touching. You're stroking the pages to make color appear, standing up, twirling around, flapping your arms, making robot noises, and roaring like a dinosaur.

Robot noises turn Larry into a robot.

The roar produces exactly what you'd expect a roar to produce.

Once dinosaurs are involved, the meeting has officially gotten away from everybody.

And here's the trick underneath it, which I think is genuinely elegant.

The book isn't doing anything.

No batteries. No screen. No flaps or tabs. You perform an action, you turn the page, and Cotter has drawn a picture that makes it look as though you caused it.

The kid supplies the missing piece.

There's also a lovely bit of visual mischief in there. Larry holds open a book, which shows a picture of Larry holding open the book, which shows a picture of Larry holding open the book, on and on. One reviewer's nephew was, in her words, "quite enchanted that THE BOOK was inside THE BOOK."

Kids stare at that page considerably longer than adults expect them to.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile 350L · ATOS 1.0 · 156 words · AR Quiz 187275 · 0.5 points. Sourcebooks, first published March 28, 2016. Thirty-two pages in hardcover, ages 4 to 8; there's also a board-book edition.

Note that word count. One hundred and fifty-six words in the entire book. As one reader put it, the words are nothing more than Larry's way of telling you what to do next. This is not a text you read. It's a set of instructions you follow.

This is book two of the Don't Push the Button! series.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

I understand exactly why this works, and it isn't complicated.

Children spend an enormous portion of their lives being told not to touch things.

Don't touch that. Put that down. Leave your brother alone. Why is that sticky? I didn't ask you to find out whether it was sticky.

Then along comes a book whose entire cover shouts DON'T TOUCH THIS BOOK.

You might as well install a flashing arrow.

But the smart move is that Larry switches sides. He starts out guarding the book from you. The first touch works. And now he wants to see what else you can do.

You're not breaking his rule anymore. You're collaborating.

That shift is what keeps it from being one joke repeated eleven times.

The other thing I like is how physical it gets. This is not a sit-and-listen book. The kid has a job, and then another job, and then a bigger one.

Touch. Move. Make a noise. Turn the page. See what you did.

After thirty years of working rooms full of children, I can tell you there's a world of difference between asking kids to pay attention and giving them something to do with the attention they've got. Asking is a losing game. Assigning is not.

This book assigns.

Which is exactly why I'd also give you a warning.

Once a room of kids is spinning, flapping, roaring and impersonating robots, you have made a decision about the next ten minutes. That energy is not going back in the box on its own.

Use this one when you want to raise the temperature, not lower it. At the end of story hour, not the beginning. And absolutely not as the last book before lights out, unless your bedtime routine has room for dinosaur noises.

Readit's Review

I like Larry.

I suspected you would.

"He tells you not to touch the book."

Yes.

"Then he tells you to touch it."

Yes.

"So the rules are fake."

Not exactly.

"Can I touch everything somebody tells me not to touch?"

Absolutely not.

"Why?"

Because this is a book.

"So?"

The stove is not interactive literature.

"Oh."

What was your favorite part?

"Dinosaur."

Naturally.

"You roar and then there's a dinosaur."

That's what got you?

"Yes."

Not the colors?

"Dinosaur."

The robot?

"Dinosaur."

Anything else to add?

"Can I roar again?"

I believe we've concluded Readit's literary analysis.

What Others Think

The numbers look like a contradiction until you read one particular review.

Goodreads has it at 3.91 out of 5 from 754 ratings and 129 reviews. That's fine, not thrilling, and a quarter of raters parked at exactly three stars.

KidTime StoryTime's read-aloud has 9.6 million views and 27,000 likes.

Rod Brown explains the gap in a single sentence, and it's the most useful thing anybody has written about this book: "Without a small child to interact with the monster's directions throughout the book, this just falls flat."

That's it exactly.

This book does not exist on the page. It exists in the room. An adult reading it alone is looking at 156 words and some drawings of a purple monster, and will quite reasonably award three stars. Put a four-year-old in front of it and the same object turns into fifteen minutes of chaos.

So the rating isn't measuring the book. It's measuring how many people evaluated it without a child present.

La Coccinelle read this one back to back with the original and prefers the sequel, because the first book had kids pressing one button while this one gets them "to stroke the pages, stand up and twirl around, flap their arms, and just generally have a great time controlling what happens next."

She also gives the honest limit, and I'd repeat it to any parent: "The gimmick might get old after a few reads, but it'll be amusing for the first few times."

That's fair. There's no second layer here for a kid who already knows what each action produces. This is a book with a lifespan.

And one reader turned up a practical problem I've not seen mentioned anywhere else. Reading it on a tablet, the pages kept turning when her toddler tried to swipe and swirl the colors, because swiping is also how you turn a page.

Buy the physical book. The whole mechanism depends on touching a page that doesn't respond, and a screen that responds ruins the illusion in the most literal way possible.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

A four, and the laughs here aren't jokes. They're consequences.

Touch this. Whoa. Try this. Uh-oh. Roar.

Dinosaur.

That structure is built for a child to guess what the next page will do with whatever ridiculous thing they just performed, and being right is most of the fun.

Read aloud you get plenty to work with too, because Larry moves through suspicious, startled, worried, delighted and finally fully committed to letting the kid run things.

The reason it isn't a five is the reason La Coccinelle names. Once a child knows what every action produces, the surprise is spent. Great books survive the fortieth reading. This one is terrific for about the first five.

Robot noises. Spinning. Flapping. Dinosaur roaring.

Four out of five, and possibly one knocked-over juice cup.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 3 to 7, for kids who like moving, making noise, monsters, dinosaurs, and books that refuse to stay politely inside themselves.

I'd reach for it first with the child who wanders off during ordinary read-alouds.

You want to move? Good. The book needs you to.

You want to make noise? Excellent. Larry has an assignment.

That converts reading from something happening at a child into something the child appears to be causing, and for a certain kid that's the difference between a book and a chore. It's the same reason this kind of structure shows up all over my reluctant readers list.

There's a small idea underneath the noise, too. Larry begins the book protecting his property and ends it discovering that letting somebody else play with it is considerably more fun. Nobody says that out loud, which is why it works.

Two practical notes. Get the physical copy, not the ebook. And if your kid already owns a shelf of interactive books built on touching, pressing and tilting pages, this will feel familiar fast.

But handing a child a book called Don't Touch This Book! isn't really a recommendation.

It's a dare.

The bridge to my own shelf is a natural one here. Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book puts the child in the same seat. Larry tells you what not to do. Dangerous Dave insists there are no dinosaurs while the pictures prove otherwise. Either way the kid ends up knowing better than the character running the show, which is the best job a book can give them.

Also, both of them end up with a dinosaur. Some things are simply correct.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

Don't touch the next book.

"Where is it?"

I walked directly into that.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit