Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast by Josh Funk

Hey, Story Seekers!

There is one drop of maple syrup left.

One.

And two breakfast foods are looking at it.

This friendship is about to be tested.

We're exploring Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast, written by Josh Funk and illustrated by Brendan Kearney.

Readit has already taken a position.

"Pancake."

You haven't heard the story.

"Doesn't matter."

Why Pancake?

"More syrup area."

I had not considered the engineering.

Book Breakdown

The cover tells you the stakes and quietly raises a question the book never answers.

In the middle is the syrup jug, lit up like a religious relic. Lady Pancake comes in from the right in a whipped-cream wig with a cherry on top. Sir French Toast comes in from the left under a strawberry and a magnificent mustache. They are glaring at each other across the prize.

And scattered all around them are beans.

Every single bean has a face.

Hold that thought, because a reader is going to do something wonderful with it in a minute.

The story is simple and moves like a rocket. Pancake and Toast are the best of friends until somebody announces there's one drop of syrup left in the refrigerator.

Friendship adjourned.

What follows is a race through refrigerator terrain that Josh Funk has clearly enjoyed inventing. They tear past the Orange Juice Fountain. They ski down Sauerkraut Peak. They reel down the linguini, cross oceans of soup, and plunge through Broccoli Forest.

Neither one is interested in second place. This is not a book where somebody says "oh, you take it." They want that syrup and they are prepared to damage a refrigerator to get it.

They arrive battered, stained and exhausted.

And too late.

Baron von Waffle got there first.

All that racing. All that sabotage. All that ruined food. And the prize is gone, which leaves the two of them looking at each other with the dawning realization that they may have wrecked a perfectly good friendship over something neither of them got.

Brendan Kearney has the harder job here, and he does it beautifully. Funk keeps inventing geography and Kearney has to build it. Broccoli isn't broccoli, it's a forest. Food isn't sitting on shelves, it's landscape. And every resident of that refrigerator gets a tiny face and an opinion about the chaos going past.

The book also almost never sits still. Somebody is always falling, sliding, climbing, vaulting or visibly regretting a recent decision.

Breakfast should not require this much cardio.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile AD760L (adult directed, so it's built to be read aloud) · ATOS 4.1 · 535 words · 0.5 AR points. First published by Sterling, September 1, 2015; now under Union Square Kids. Forty pages, ages 4 to 8.

Note the ATOS of 4.1 against only 535 words. That's unusually high for a picture book and it's the vocabulary doing it. This book uses real words and doesn't apologize for them.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

What I like most here isn't the plot. It's what the words make your mouth do.

Plop. Flip. Screeched. Hurdled. Rappelled. Vaulted.

Good read-aloud writing doesn't just report what happened. It hands the reader something fun to perform while it happens, and Funk is generous with that.

He's also earned it the hard way. Since 2015 he's presented at over nine hundred and fifty schools, classrooms and libraries. You can hear that in the writing. This is somebody who has watched real children react to his own sentences, repeatedly, and adjusted.

Now my one practical warning, and I mean it.

Read this once to yourself before you read it to anybody else.

Kirkus flagged the meter as occasionally tricky and they're right. Some lines don't fall out of your mouth correctly on the first attempt.

That's survivable in most books. It's a real problem in this one, because the whole thing is built for speed. If you stop mid-rhyme to work out where the stress goes, you've installed a traffic light in the middle of a race.

Find the rhythm first. Then go fast.

The other thing I enjoy is how seriously everybody treats something completely trivial.

One drop of syrup. That's the entire crisis. And Pancake and Toast behave as though the future of breakfast hangs on it.

Kids know that feeling precisely. Give two children one desirable object and you are no longer a parent, you are chairing negotiations. Who had it first. Who touched it. Whose piece is bigger. Why he got more yesterday.

The friendship lesson isn't hidden, and I won't pretend it is. Competition gets the better of them, and by the time they work that out, Baron von Waffle has solved the syrup problem on their behalf.

But the lesson arrives immediately after a bean avalanche, which does a lot to help it go down.

Readit's Review

"Baron von Waffle cheated."

Did he?

"He got the syrup."

That isn't cheating.

"He wasn't even in the race."

Exactly.

"So he cheated."

No. He simply arrived.

"That's worse."

Why?

"They did all that work."

Life is occasionally like that.

"I would have hidden the syrup."

Then nobody gets it.

"I get it."

Ah.

"Also why is there a Broccoli Forest?"

Because the refrigerator is their world.

"Do the broccoli know they're broccoli?"

I don't know.

"Can Lady Pancake eat pancakes?"

Readit.

"What?"

You have located a problem I would rather not investigate.

What Others Think

Goodreads has it at 4.25 out of 5 from 2,392 ratings and 461 reviews, with 81 percent at four or five stars.

The praise is almost entirely about the read-aloud. Laura calls it "a joy to read aloud" and picks out exactly the words I did: screeched, hurdled, rappelled, vaulted. "Words that fill the air with energy and sounds."

That's the right read. The vocabulary isn't decoration between rhymes, it's the engine.

Now, the funniest thing anybody has written about this book, and it's also a genuine observation about its internal logic.

Marilyn Weiss noticed that all the food in this story appears to be alive, and then followed that thought somewhere the author probably hoped nobody would go.

"I was concerned when Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast went off in search of syrup to eat. Is the syrup not sentient? Are they not eating their food friend in front of all of these onlookers? Do their royal titles grant them the power to consume who they please?"

She then reports, with evident relief, that the syrup bottle is alive but the syrup itself apparently isn't.

And then she notices the butter has a face.

"I am very concerned for that butter."

So am I now. Thank you, Marilyn. I was having a normal evening.

The real dissent comes from Liz B, and it's specific rather than vague, which makes it useful. She found the rhymes "sing-songy and sometimes awkward" and raised four objections, of which my favorite is simply: who keeps leftover pancakes?

She also supplies the only piece of evidence that actually matters. She asked her son what he thought.

"That was weird."

Did you like it?

"No."

That's worth printing, because it's the counterweight to 461 mostly glowing reviews. This book has a specific rhythm, and a kid who doesn't catch it will find the whole thing odd rather than funny.

Professional reviewers were warmer. School Library Journal starred it. Publishers Weekly praised Funk's rhyme and the way Kearney personifies an entire refrigerator while keeping Pancake and Toast looking faintly regal even after everything that happens to them.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

Four, and the comedy is in the commitment rather than in punchlines.

Two breakfast foods with royal titles racing through a refrigerator. Sauerkraut Peak. A bean avalanche. And Baron von Waffle strolling in at the end to ruin everything for everybody, which is the single funniest structural decision in the book.

Kearney keeps stacking little reactions into the background while Funk keeps the language sprinting.

Not a five for two reasons. The friendship lesson is visible from a distance, and the meter needs rehearsal in a book that lives or dies on pace.

But once you've got the rhythm in your mouth, this thing flies.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 8, for kids who like races, food jokes, rhyme, and characters who turn a trivial problem into a full emergency.

It's a read-aloud first and foremost, and it rewards a grown-up who enjoys performing language.

One warning that isn't about the book's quality: your child will ruin your pacing. The race makes you want to fly, and Kearney has hidden funny little food characters along the entire route. Kids who like searching pictures will stop you precisely when you've built up speed.

That's their job. Let them.

It's also a good one for siblings, because Pancake and Toast don't stop competing due to a speech. They stop because winning became more important than the person they were racing, and then somebody else ate the prize.

That lands harder than any lecture.

If your kid takes to it, this is book one of a series, so there's more refrigerator where this came from.

I checked my own catalog for a bridge and I'm leaving it out. I've got books about friendship, chaos and problem solving, but nothing that runs on this particular competition-and-sharing engine, and a forced recommendation isn't worth the space.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

There's one pancake left.

"Mine."

I hadn't finished the sentence.

"Too slow."

The book has taught us nothing.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit