The Grossest Picture Book Ever by Derek Taylor Kent

Hey, Story Seekers!

Poo. Snot. Roaches. Vomit.

And we haven't finished the opening greeting.

We're exploring The Grossest Picture Book Ever, written by Derek Taylor Kent and illustrated by Lynx Studios.

Readit heard the title and volunteered immediately.

"You forgot boogers."

We're managing without your help.

"And farts."

Readit.

"I'm making a list."

Wonderful. Welcome to Gross.

Book Breakdown

Look at the cover and notice what isn't on it.

There's no character. Nobody to root for, nobody to recognize. Just green slime dripping down all four edges and the title written in it.

That's an honest cover, and it tells you exactly what's being sold. Not a story. A sensation.

Inside there's a town called Gross, and the people who live there are proud of it. This isn't a book where somebody does something disgusting by accident and learns about hand-washing. In Gross, being disgusting is competitive. Everybody is trying to out-gross everybody else.

Two young residents take you on the tour.

You meet Larry Magoo, who drives a truck made of poo. Libby Sue Groches, who keeps millions of roaches. Benjamin Blott, who lives in a house made of snot.

I'd like to pause and thank my own house, which has never once been made of snot.

The tour continues through disgusting food, goo, bugs and an assortment of bodily substances that do not usually receive featured billing in children's publishing.

That's the engine. Kent asks whether the next thing can be grosser, and then Lynx Studios has to draw it.

It's written in rhyme, which gives the tour some bounce, and it closes with a challenge: read the whole book aloud without laughing and you win.

The publisher also says the book carries environmental messages, and I want to be straight with you about that. It's in the official description. It is not something a single reader I found mentioned, and it is not what anybody walks away talking about.

Draw your own conclusion about how loudly that part comes through.

For teachers and librarians: Whimsical World, October 8, 2019. Thirty-two pages, roughly ages 4 to 8.

No reading levels. I looked for Lexile, ATOS, Guided Reading and AR data and found nothing reliable, so there's nothing here to quote.

Content note, and this is the most useful thing in this review. One reviewer was unable to finish the book, and the scene she names is a chef serving a large pile of blood-colored vomit, illustrated in detail, which is then eaten by a crowd that includes young children. Whether that reads as hilarious or as a step too far is genuinely going to depend on the household. I'd want to know before it turned up at story time.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Kids like gross things. Not all of them, but enough that humanity has sustained a thriving fart-joke industry for several thousand years.

And I understand the appeal completely. Gross humor hands a child permission to laugh at the exact things they're told not to mention at the table.

Adults spend years saying don't talk about that.

Then a book puts it in the middle of the page in full color.

Oh, we are absolutely talking about it now.

This book understands that, and it does not dip a toe in. It cannonballs.

Which is also where judging it gets interesting, because if you're looking for a story underneath the grossness, there isn't one.

Tour Gross. Meet gross person. See gross thing. Turn page. Get grosser. Repeat.

Now, I want to be fair here, because "no plot" isn't automatically a flaw. Plenty of beloved books are catalogs rather than stories. Alphabet books have no plot. Neither does a seek-and-find.

The question is whether the thing it does instead has any variety in it.

And here's my honest answer: not much. The escalation is one-directional. Grosser, then grosser. There's no turn, no surprise, no moment where the book does something other than what it just did.

Compare it with Walter the Farting Dog, which is every bit as committed to its rude joke but wraps it around a dog who might lose his home. The fart causes the problem and then solves it. There's architecture under the gag.

This is a tour. The attraction is the attraction.

Come see the snot house. Try not to be sick. Gift shop on the left.

But here's the thing I keep coming back to, and it's the question that actually matters.

Does the kid it's aimed at want to turn the page?

For that kid, yes. Obviously yes. Once you've shown a child a truck made of poo, they need to know what's next, and you cannot title a book The Grossest Picture Book Ever and then serve up three tasteful burps and a dirty sock.

Kent made a promise on the cover and he keeps it.

I respect the commitment. I just wouldn't mistake commitment for depth.

One more thing worth knowing, because it changes how you read the book. Derek Taylor Kent is not somebody who wandered in to cash a check on toilet humor. He writes the Scary School series for HarperCollins, and El Perro con Sombrero came out through Holt. He can build a story when he wants one.

He didn't want one here. That was a choice.

Readit's Review

Poo truck.

Yes.

"Why?"

Because Gross.

"Does it smell?"

The book does not come with that feature.

"Good."

Finally, some restraint.

"Can you drive a poo truck?"

I'd advise against it.

"What if it has wheels?"

That is not the primary engineering concern.

"I like the roaches."

Why?

"Millions."

That is precisely why I do not.

"Could you have one roach?"

No.

"Two?"

No.

"Nine hundred?"

Your negotiating technique needs work.

"House made of snot?"

Absolutely not.

"So you don't want to live in Gross?"

Readit, I don't want to stop there for gas.

What Others Think

This is the strangest evidence picture we've run into.

KidTime StoryTime's read-aloud has 1.2 million views and 8,400 likes.

Goodreads has 19 ratings and 6 reviews, averaging 3.89.

Nineteen. I'm not going to pretend that's a consensus, and neither should anybody else.

But the six reviews we have are unusually far apart, and that's worth looking at.

On one side, readers who love the commitment. Aeicha enjoyed the poo cars, the bugs, the snot house and the disgusting food, and found it gross in the best way. A Readers' Favorite reviewer called it hilarious and went back through the pages because the sheer ridiculousness kept landing.

On the other side, a review from The Baby Bookworm that I'd call the most useful thing written about this book, whether or not you agree with it.

She opens by saying it "definitely, unfortunately, lives up to its title." Then: "I'm not really going to describe the plot more, because there isn't one."

She quotes a line from the book about the poo truck, that as he drives around town, all the streets turn to brown. She describes the house of dripping green mucus. And then the vomit scene I flagged above, which she found genuinely too much.

Her conclusion is that she couldn't finish it, for two reasons: she didn't want to show her child the rest, and she was about to be physically sick.

That is a real reaction from a person who reviews picture books daily and rarely pans one. It deserves to be on the record next to the million views.

Another reviewer lands in the middle, expecting gross-humor kids to enjoy it while finding the rhyme uneven and warning that squeamish readers will simply be repulsed.

I think that's the honest summary. This book doesn't need everybody's approval.

It needs the right kid.

Belly Laugh Scale

3 out of 5: Solid Chuckles

I went back and forth on this one longer than the page count justifies, and I've landed on three.

For the exact right kid this behaves like a five. Poo truck, snot house, millions of roaches, and art that refuses to let you imagine a tasteful version of any of it. That child will be delighted.

But this scale measures how funny a book is, and the funniest books have a second engine running underneath the obvious joke. Character. Timing. A story problem. Something that makes the twentieth page land differently from the fourth.

Here, grossness is the only engine. It escalates, but it never turns. And a joke that only gets louder eventually stops being a joke and becomes a volume setting.

Add a meaningful slice of readers who aren't amused but genuinely put off, and three is where I honestly land.

Solid Chuckles, and a lot of them if your kid is built for it.

If your kid isn't, subtract several thousand points.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 8, and only for the kid who already believes poop, boogers, bugs and slime are comedy gold.

You know whether that's your child. You don't need me to identify them. They're probably laughing because I wrote "poop."

It has a real use, too. For a kid who takes one look at a normal picture book and concludes that more interesting things are happening elsewhere, telling them there's a truck made of poo in here may be the entire negotiation. That's not nothing, and it's the same reason gross-out books keep showing up on my reluctant readers list.

But I would not recommend this one broadly, and I want to be specific about who should skip it.

Kids with sensitive stomachs. Adults who can't stand bathroom humor. Anybody hoping for a character to care about. And, given the vomit scene, any household where that particular image is going to be a problem at bedtime.

Check it before you read it out loud to a group. That's my actual advice.

There's a wider point here that I'll be carrying into our funny-books list, and this book is the clearest example of it yet.

Popularity and quality are two different questions.

KidTime found well over a million viewers for this. Reader reaction is genuinely split, and some of it is scathing. Both of those facts are true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other.

My job isn't to declare that every book with a big audience is great, or that every divisive book is bad.

It's to work out which kid it's great for, and then tell you honestly whether that's your kid.

For this one, the answer is narrow but real.

I'm not forcing a bridge to my own books here. Nothing on my shelf runs on this fuel, and a recommendation you can feel being wedged in isn't worth having.

If your kid does want the gross shelf done properly, though, I ranked fifteen fart books here, and the test every one of them had to pass was doing something besides being disgusting.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

We're leaving Gross.

"Can I take a souvenir?"

Absolutely not.

"It's just a little piece of the house."

DROP THE SNOT.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit