Too Much Glue by Jason Lefebvre

Hey, Story Seekers!

There are children who use glue.

And then there is Matty.

Matty is not interested in a tasteful little dot. He wants glue glasses. Glue mustaches. Glue bouncy balls.

And one day at school he looks at a table full of art supplies and thinks:

You know what this project needs?

Me.

We're exploring Too Much Glue, written by Jason Lefebvre and illustrated by Zac Retz.

Readit has already asked whether glue tastes good.

"It smells interesting."

That is not an invitation.

"I didn't say I'd eat it."

Good.

"I was thinking about swimming."

Somehow worse.

Book Breakdown

Two things about that cover.

First, look behind him. Those are shelves, and they're stacked with bottles of glue and paste. Matty hasn't just used too much glue. He has located the supply.

Second, and this matters for everything that follows: he is completely, uncomplicatedly delighted, and there is no adult anywhere in the frame.

Hold onto that, because it turns out to be the thing readers argue about.

Matty loves glue. So does his dad. At home the two of them make oodles of ridiculous glue creations together, which is a lovely detail and also, arguably, the root of the problem.

At school, his art teacher has one rule. Too much glue never dries.

Matty has heard the rule. Matty understands the rule.

Matty finds the fullest bottles in the room.

With a squeeze and a plop he pours out a lake of glue, adds sequins and glitter, and belly-flops directly into the middle of it.

Which goes beautifully right up until he tries to stand.

He is stuck to the desk.

Now the whole class mobilizes. They try a yarn lasso. That fails. Somebody brings a toy tow truck. Also fails. The nurse's supplies get involved. Still stuck.

And here's the engine: every rescue attempt adds another layer to Matty. He gets less boy-shaped and more like a walking craft cupboard as the yarn, the tape and the medical supplies all commit themselves permanently to his situation.

He does eventually get upright. By then the glue has dried.

Dad arrives. And instead of erupting at a child who has turned himself into a refrigerator magnet, Dad looks at him and sees a work of art.

The dried Matty-shaped glue sculpture ends up on the fridge.

Then the family moves on to duct tape.

Zac Retz has a real problem to solve here, because glue is not inherently funny to look at. A white puddle is not comedy.

So he makes Matty the joke instead. Matty is thrilled while every adult in the room comes apart. The glue gets stringier, the mess gets busier, and Retz keeps changing the camera, sometimes looking down on the whole disaster, sometimes right into Matty's beaming sticky face.

Teacher: this is a catastrophe.

Matty: best art class ever.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile 600L · ATOS 3.1 · 710 words · AR Quiz 159645 · 0.5 points. Flashlight Press, 2013. Thirty-two pages, ages 4 to 8. Winner of the PAL Award.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Matty is a character where the grown-up and the kid are reading two different books.

The adult sees waste, mess, a broken rule, a ruined table and about forty minutes of cleanup.

The kid sees a boy who jumped in the glue.

And there goes the room.

Lefebvre builds the comedy by repetition. Somebody tries to help. The rescue fails. Another object attaches itself to Matty permanently. His description gets longer each time.

That's the bit I'd perform. Once a room catches the pattern, give that growing list of stuck-on objects a rhythm and let them hear the pile getting bigger. Kids will start predicting what sticks next, and predicting is most of the fun.

But the thing worth actually talking about is the ending, because it's the most divisive decision in the book.

Dad doesn't get angry. He calls it art.

Change that one page and you have a completely different book. Matty Uses Too Much Glue and Learns to Follow Directions. Perfectly respectable. Considerably less fun.

I like the choice Lefebvre made. But I want to be straight with you: a lot of thoughtful readers don't, and their objection isn't precious.

It's that Matty faces no consequences at all, and is in fact rewarded. He breaks a stated rule, brings an entire class to a halt, requires a rescue operation, and ends up on the refrigerator for it.

I don't think that's wrong as a description. It's exactly what happens.

Here's where I land, and it's a distinction I'd want a kid to hear.

Matty's enthusiasm is not the problem. His enthusiasm is terrific and I'd never want to talk a child out of it.

His decision-making needs work.

Those two things are both true, and the book only says the first one out loud. Which is fine, as long as the adult in the room says the second one.

And the art teacher isn't the villain here either, though the book does draw her as fairly helpless. She's trying to run an art room, not a human flypaper experiment, and she's right about the glue.

So the question I'd ask a kid is better than "was Matty good or bad."

How could Matty have made something this wild without wrecking art class?

That's a real question with real answers, and it lets a child keep the part of Matty that's worth keeping.

Readit's Review

I would do it.

No.

"You didn't even ask what."

You'd jump in the glue.

"Yes."

No.

"But it looks squishy."

You'd get stuck.

"Then everybody tries to rescue me."

That is not a selling point.

"The tow truck was too small."

Also not the lesson.

"I'd use a real tow truck."

READIT.

What was the funniest part?

"When everything keeps sticking to him."

Okay.

"And he doesn't even look worried."

Exactly.

"I wouldn't be worried either."

You would if the bell rang and you were permanently attached to the art table.

"Then I'd have my own desk forever."

I am beginning to understand why this book gets reread so often.

What Others Think

Everybody agrees this book is funny. The argument is about something else entirely.

Goodreads has it at 3.98 out of 5 from 1,300 ratings and 266 reviews. KidTime StoryTime's read-aloud is at 944,000 views, and they note it was made "by popular demand," which means kids were asking.

But look at the middle of that Goodreads distribution: 22 percent parked at exactly three stars. That's a lot of people who enjoyed it and had a reservation.

Here's the reservation, put most sharply by reviewer La Coccinelle: "Matty faces no consequences for his actions. In fact, he's rewarded for them."

Her recommendation is the interesting part. She wouldn't give it to messy kids, but she would give it to tidy ones, who can enjoy the chaos while recognizing it isn't how you behave at school.

That's a genuinely smart reframe and I hadn't considered it.

Susan raises a different objection about the adults: the art teacher is drawn as essentially incompetent, hyperventilating while the class runs wild, and Mom doesn't know what to do either, leaving Dad to save the day.

She's right that that's the shape of it. Whether it bothers you is a matter of taste, but it's fair to notice.

Then there are the two teachers in the reviews, and they land in completely opposite places, which I think is the most useful thing in the whole file.

Debby uses it as a cautionary tale and it works: "Even though i warn them all the time about using too much glue, they always look at me like what could happen if i use too much? This book shows them why."

Judy Lindow, also clearly a teacher, offers the most balanced verdict anybody gave: "Kids will love the book. Make it clear you're not endorsing the behavior."

She then lays out the classroom reality that a picture book gets to ignore. Glue costs money. Cleanup costs time. And the one or two children playing around, in her words, distract and annoy the other kids who actually want to do art.

She also names the thing that makes Matty land differently at school than at home: what works with one or two supervised kids at the kitchen table does not translate to a room of twenty-one who are meant to be working on their own.

That's not a scold. That's somebody who has cleaned it up.

And on the positive side, Tina reports reading it to her twin boys "a ton," loving that the other students try to help while the art teacher has no idea what to do.

The professional criticism is milder and it's about craft. Kirkus found the cumulative language loses its rhythm toward the end and felt the story never quite becomes as much fun as its enormous premise promises, while rating the pictures above the text.

I'd agree with that last part. The situation is the strongest thing here, and the situation does not need decorating.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

A four, and notice that none of the criticism above is about whether the book is funny. It isn't. It's about the message.

The central image does a lot of work on its own. Matty doesn't get a dab of glue on his elbow. He belly-flops into a lake of it. Then every attempt to fix the situation makes it worse, and each failed rescue leaves something permanently attached to him.

That's proper escalation, and Retz sells it by keeping Matty radiantly happy while the adults around him reach the end of their professional training.

Not a five, and Kirkus put a finger on why. The cumulative language gets crowded near the end, and once you've worked out the rescue pattern you can see the machinery turning.

But read this to a room of crafty kids and it absolutely goes.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 8, for kids who like art, making things, messy humor and plans that go spectacularly wrong.

Crafty kids understand Matty instantly. So does any child who has ever heard the phrase "that's enough glue" and privately disagreed.

It's a strong classroom read-aloud, but I'd take Judy Lindow's advice and read it as a comedy rather than as a model. Say out loud that we're laughing at Matty, not copying him. Kids can hold both of those at once, and they're generally better at it than we give them credit for.

And if you have a child who genuinely will go and try it, La Coccinelle's advice is the practical one: this may be a better book for the tidy kid than the messy one.

You know which one you've got.

Afterwards there's real conversation available, and none of it needs a worksheet. Was the teacher right? Was Matty? Can something start as a mistake and end up as art? How could his friends have solved it better?

And most urgently: should we put the glue away before we start this discussion?

For a kid who says books are boring, this one is an easy sell, because the problem is visual and takes four words to explain. Kid jumps in glue. Kid cannot get out. I've rounded up more of those on my reluctant readers list.

The bridge to my own shelf is Petey Perfectpants and the Silly Sock Puppet Problem, and it's a close neighbor. Both take place at school, both involve a kid losing control of a situation, and both get funnier as the original problem quietly picks up far more chaos than anybody ordered.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

We're done.

"Can we do an art project?"

Sure.

"Where's the glue?"

Crayons.

We're doing crayons.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit