Pat the Beastie by Henrik Drescher

Hey, Story Seekers!

Today, an important lesson about pets.

Be kind to them.

Do not pull their fur.

Do not jiggle their eyes.

Do not pluck their boogers.

I genuinely hoped to get three sentences into this review before typing that.

We're exploring Pat the Beastie: A Pull-and-Poke Book, written and illustrated by Henrik Drescher.

Readit is already circling.

"Worm boogers?"

Yes.

"How do you know they're worm boogers?"

The book is extremely specific.

"I have questions."

So do I.

Book Breakdown

Look at what's happening on that cover, because it tells you everything.

Beastie is enormous. Shaggy, green, with a snout full of teeth that runs most of the width of the page.

And Paul and Judy are sitting on a swing.

The swing is hanging from his jaw.

They have strung a rope through the mouth of a creature with forty teeth and made a playground out of it, and Beastie's eyes are rolled sideways at them with an expression of profound, weary patience.

That's the whole book. The danger is drawn right into the picture, and the monster is simply putting up with it.

For now.

Inside, Paul and Judy are not model pet owners. They pull Beastie's fur. They jiggle his eyes. They tickle his feet. They pluck his boogers, of which the book supplies two, brightly colored and made of rubber.

And crucially, the reader is not a bystander. The book hands you the fur. Pull this. Poke that. Lift this. Squeeze that.

Meanwhile the warnings keep arriving. Always be kind to your pets. Leave Beastie alone.

Paul and Judy never listen.

The book's own opening line tells you how this ends: You should never monkey around with a Beastie.

Eventually Beastie handles it himself.

By eating them.

That's not me spoiling a twist, by the way. It's the setup for the sequel, Love the Beastie, whose publisher cheerfully confirms that Paul and Judy spend some time inside Beastie before being spat back out considerably wiser about how to treat a friend.

The physical object is most of the experience. Fur to pull. Pop-up eyes to jiggle. Squishers, squeezers and squeakers. Drescher even tucks a miniature book inside the book for Beastie to read.

This isn't a story that happens to have interactive bits stapled on.

The interaction is the crime.

For teachers and librarians: Originally Hyperion Books for Children, 1993, eighteen pages. Workman reissued it in 2009 in a sturdier board-book format.

No reading levels. I searched for Lexile, ATOS, Guided Reading and AR data and found nothing reliable, so none of it is here.

On age: the book itself suggests three and up. A reviewer who clearly knows it well argues for five and up because of the gross-out material and the ending, and having looked at Beastie's teeth, I'd side with her.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's the fact that changed how I read this book.

Henrik Drescher's work is held in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Rijksmuseum. He's won awards from the Society of Illustrators. He was born in Copenhagen, came to the States as a teenager, and has spent decades filling enormous journals with notes and drawings from all over the world.

So the man who built a children's book with two rubber boogers in it has work hanging in MoMA.

That reframes the whole thing. This isn't somebody being crude because they couldn't think of anything better. It's a serious artist deliberately taking the sweetest, gentlest format in all of children's publishing, the soft touch-and-feel book, and filling it with teeth.

And a reader on Goodreads spotted the tradition it belongs to, which I thought was a genuinely sharp catch.

She traces it back to Slovenly Peter, the Victorian collection of cautionary tales where children who misbehave come to spectacularly horrible ends.

She's right, and that's a hundred and eighty years of pedigree. Children's literature has an old, dark branch where the lesson arrives with consequences attached, and this is a 1993 descendant of it wearing rubber boogers.

Which explains why the ending works instead of feeling cruel. You cannot be shocked. You were warned on every page.

Now here's the part I admire as a craftsman.

Drescher makes the reader complicit.

You're not watching Paul and Judy make bad choices. You're being invited to help, and your hands are on the book.

"Don't pull Beastie's fur."

Well. You've put the fur right there.

And I have fingers.

This seems poorly planned on somebody's part.

Be kind to animals is not new territory. We've been working that one for a while. But most books stand there and tell you about it.

This book hands you the fur and waits.

Then Beastie reacts, and the lesson isn't something you were told. It's something you did.

Read aloud, that creates a lovely little pause every few pages.

Should we?

Don't.

We're going to.

Bad idea.

Do it.

And then you both look at Beastie.

That's real audience machinery, and it's why a book this old and this odd has hung around in people's memories.

One honest caution, and it's about temperament rather than age. Some kids will howl at this. Some will look at Beastie's teeth and quietly decide the expedition has gone far enough.

Gross and creepy is hilarious to a certain child.

To another child it is simply gross and creepy.

Know your reader.

Readit's Review

I want to poke the boogers.

Of course you do.

"Are they squishy?"

Apparently they are interactive.

"That's not an answer."

I'm trying to preserve some dignity here.

"You just reviewed a book with two rubber boogers in it."

Fair.

Would you pull Beastie's fur after being told not to?

"No."

Excellent.

"I'd jiggle his eyes."

Readit.

"What?"

We literally just discussed this.

"I didn't pull the fur."

That is not how being good works.

"Then I would read Beastie's tiny book."

Finally. A sensible decision.

"And THEN jiggle his eyes."

We are making no progress.

What Others Think

Fair warning on the numbers: this is an old, strange, hard-to-find book and the reader pool is tiny.

Goodreads shows 4.02 out of 5 from 49 ratings and 4 written reviews.

Four reviews. I'm not going to pretend that's a consensus, and I'd treat anybody who claims otherwise with suspicion.

But the four we have are unusually thoughtful, and they agree on the shape of the thing.

Eilonwy: "Forget those sappy interactive kids' books. This one is hilarious, and reminds everyone to show respect for fellow household members." She adds the note that explains the low numbers: "Sadly, I think it's out of print, or everyone I know with toddlers would get a copy."

Ronyell gives the most complete account, and it's the one I'd hand a parent: "hilarious and revolting," with illustrations that are "highly creative and creepy at the same time." Her detail about the art is the right one. Beastie's face shows the pain he's going through while Paul and Judy work him over, and that's what keeps you on the monster's side.

She's also the source of the age advice: the book says three and up, she'd say five and up, and she recommends a parent read it first and decide.

That's good, specific guidance and I'd follow it.

Jane supplies the literary lineage back to Slovenly Peter and the Victorian tradition of horrible ends for badly behaved children, then wisely declines to spoil the ending.

The sharpest criticism is the oldest. When the original edition came out in 1993, Publishers Weekly liked some of the interactive ideas but doubted the aim: the Pat the Bunny parody would fly over a four-year-old's head, while older kids might have outgrown touch-and-feel books altogether. It also predicted some adults would simply be put off.

That's a legitimate hit, and it's still the book's real weakness.

But I'd answer it this way: a child doesn't need to know Pat the Bunny to enjoy pulling fur off a monster. The parody is a bonus layer for the grown-up, and the grown-up is the one buying it.

This is not the book you get because Grandma asked for something lovely about caring for animals.

Unless Grandma is excellent.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

A four, with the loudest caveat I've attached to any score.

Not every child will laugh at this. Plenty won't. It's gross, interactive, a little dark and genuinely creepy, and it is built on that delicious feeling of being told absolutely not to touch a thing that the book has helpfully installed for you to touch.

For the right kid, the two rubber boogers alone will do more work than most whole picture books manage.

Then there's the payoff. Paul and Judy push. Beastie takes it. And takes it.

Until he doesn't.

That's the laugh this whole strange machine has been winding up for, and it lands because the book warned you on every single page.

I'm holding the fifth face back because the audience for this is genuinely narrow, and a book I have to hand over with a temperament warning isn't a five for everybody.

Kids who like their humor sweet and cuddly will disagree with the four.

Beastie will survive it.

Final Explorer Verdict

This one is for a particular kid, and I'd rather name that kid precisely than pretend it's for everyone.

Roughly five and up, and specifically the child who likes gross humor, monsters, touch-and-feel books, and the electric thrill of doing exactly what a book has just told them not to do.

For a sensitive reader, look at it first. Beastie is deliberately weird. The children mistreat him for the entire book. The ending involves being eaten. That is substantially more bite than your average interactive board book.

Two practical notes. It's out of print, so you're looking at used copies, and a used interactive book may arrive with its fur already pulled and its boogers long gone. Check the listing. And because the whole point is the pulling and poking, a library copy that's been loved to death won't give you the experience.

But I think the reason it survives in people's memories is simple.

It commits.

Drescher didn't make a slightly mischievous touch-and-feel book. He made the deranged cousin who turned up at the family reunion with rubber boogers, and he happens to be an artist whose work sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Underneath all of it is an idea any kid can follow.

If somebody keeps asking you to stop bothering them, stop bothering them.

Ideally before they eat you.

I looked for a bridge to my own shelf and there isn't an honest one. Beastie doesn't need a sales pitch tied to his tail. He needs Paul and Judy to leave it alone.

If your kid is the gross-out type, though, I ranked fifteen fart books here, and the ones that survived the cut all do what Beastie does: build an actual story under the disgusting part.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

What did we learn?

"Be kind to pets."

Good.

"Don't pull their fur."

Excellent.

"Don't jiggle their eyes."

We're getting somewhere.

"And if your pet has worm boogers..."

No.

"Don't you want to hear the rest?"

Absolutely not.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit