We Don't Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins

Hey, Story Seekers!

First day of school.

New teacher.

New classroom.

New friends.

Penelope Rex is nervous about all of it.

Then she walks in and discovers that her classmates are children.

Delicious children.

Oh, Penelope.

We're exploring We Don't Eat Our Classmates, written and illustrated by Ryan T. Higgins, about a young T. rex trying to make friends while dealing with one fairly significant social obstacle.

She keeps eating them.

Readit is stuck on the title.

"Why did somebody have to make that a rule?"

Excellent question.

Book Breakdown

Start with the cover, because it gives the whole thing away and almost nobody notices.

Penelope is standing in the middle of a classroom. A chair is knocked over. A backpack is on the floor. There's a single abandoned shoe.

And a long string of drool is hanging out of her mouth.

You are not looking at a dinosaur about to go to school.

You're looking at the aftermath.

Inside, Penelope has all the ordinary first-day worries. Her mom gets her a new backpack. Her dad packs her lunch. She wonders whether anyone will like her.

Higgins seeds the joke early and quietly. Penelope's backpack has ponies on it. Ponies are her favorite.

Because ponies are delicious.

Then she gets to class, sees that every one of her classmates is a human child, and eats them.

All of them.

Her teacher, Mrs. Noodleman, instructs her to spit them out at once.

She does.

They are extremely slimy about it.

Nobody is hurt, for the record. Getting eaten in this book means going in the mouth and coming back out covered in dinosaur drool. It is disgusting and entirely survivable.

But the damage is done. The children are now afraid of her, which is a reasonable position, and Penelope cannot understand why nobody wants to play.

Penelope.

Sweetie.

We have a theory.

She genuinely tries. Her dad gives her advice. She works on restraint. The restraint is inconsistent, and one classmate in particular keeps ending up in her mouth, which produces the best running gag in the book: a small voice reporting that Penelope ate William Omoto again.

Watch the pictures during this stretch. Higgins keeps finding ways to show her failing. My favorite is Penelope waiting at the bottom of the slide.

With her mouth open.

Then she meets Walter.

Walter is the class goldfish.

Penelope puts her finger near him.

CHOMP.

And suddenly Penelope understands something she could not quite grasp while she was the one doing the chomping.

Being eaten stinks.

That changes things. Not instantly, and not perfectly. But she gets much better at seeing classmates as potential friends rather than lunch.

Higgins takes the most over-farmed setup in picture books, first-day-of-school nerves, and drops a hungry predator into the middle of it. That's the whole trick, and it works because he plays it straight.

His art helps enormously. Penelope isn't drawn as a monster. She's a round, sort of goofy little dinosaur in pink overalls with a hugely readable face. The human kids are tiny next to her, which makes it funnier when she stands there baffled about why she has no friends.

Gee.

Mystery.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile AD500L (the AD means adult directed, so it's built for reading aloud) · Guided Reading Level L · DRA 20 to 24 · ATOS 2.3. Disney-Hyperion, June 19, 2018.

Note the age spread. Disney lists it for ages 3 to 5. Scholastic's classroom edition is pitched at grades K to 2. Both are right, and the reason is in the reader reactions below.

It won the 2019 E.B. White Read Aloud Award in the picture book category and a 2018 Cybils Award, and it was a Goodreads Choice Award nominee. Penelope now has her own series, including one starring the goldfish.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

I like a book that knows exactly where its laugh is and doesn't wander around looking for it.

Penelope doesn't nibble one kid and then spend six pages processing whether that was appropriate.

She sees the class.

She eats the class.

Now we have a problem.

And because the problem is so enormous and ridiculous, Higgins gets to smuggle in something genuinely useful underneath it.

Penelope wants friends. She knows that much.

What she does not understand is what being Penelope feels like from the other side.

An adult can explain that all day long. Think about how your actions make other people feel. Sure. Good luck.

Or.

Goldfish bites dinosaur.

That'll do it.

Walter is the smartest thing in the book, because Penelope doesn't learn empathy from a speech. She experiences the other side of it personally and immediately.

CHOMP.

Oh.

So that's what that's like.

Kids understand that. It's the only version of that lesson that has ever actually worked on anybody.

For reading it out loud, there's one page turn that carries the whole show. Penelope walks in, sees the children, and you turn the page and they're gone.

Don't rush it.

After thirty years of performing for kids, I can tell you that when an audience works something out a half second before you say it, the laugh is bigger than anything you could have delivered. Get out of the way and let them have it.

Same with Walter. Let them see that fish. Let Penelope's finger get close. Then wait.

One honest caution.

The lesson is not hidden. If you eat people, they will not want to be your friend. Most of us had arrived at that independently.

But Higgins never lectures it. He puts the idea in, lets a goldfish close the argument, and keeps the story funny the whole way.

That's the right call. The book doesn't need the help, and neither does your kid.

Readit's Review

Penelope ate THE WHOLE CLASS.

How fast did she do that?

Did Mrs. Noodleman turn around for two seconds?

And when they come back out they are COVERED in dinosaur spit.

Gross.

Excellent.

Poor William Omoto gets eaten more than anybody. He keeps just putting his shoe back on and going about his day. That guy is a legend.

I like Walter. Penelope is an enormous dinosaur and Walter is a tiny goldfish and she thinks she's the scary one.

NOPE.

CHOMP.

And then she's scared to go near him!

I would bring that up constantly.

"Hey Penelope. Remember when you ate an entire classroom?"

"Yes."

"Remember when one small fish scared you?"

"Please stop."

Also her backpack holds 300 sandwiches.

THREE HUNDRED.

I want that backpack. Not for sandwiches. For books.

What Others Think

Goodreads has it at 4.52 out of 5 from 12,322 ratings and 1,880 reviews, which is the highest rating of anything we've reviewed. Sixty-four percent of those are five stars.

Colby Sharp keeps it short: "One of the funniest books of 2018."

Calista read it with her niece and nephew and reports the detail that matters: "The nephew laughed and laughed ever time a child was eaten."

Donna Backshall quotes the line that sells the whole book: "Children are the same as us on the inside. Just tastier." She adds, "It's not often that I laugh out loud at a book, but while reading this one I never stopped."

The most useful review, though, comes from Betsy, a librarian who actually tested it, and she found something worth knowing before you buy.

First, on reading it aloud: "Every single time I turn the page and read this part, the audience gives a little gasp. They honestly didn't see it coming."

Then the part I'd want every parent to hear. She had a colleague read it to a group of children, and the kids took it more seriously than the adults expected:

"Identification with Penelope surpassed anything I might have expected. All children can feel her fears, worries, and sympathize with her slippery grip on impulse control. The book is definitely funny, but it's funnier to older kids. For those on the younger side, it's practically an instruction manual."

That's the sharpest thing anybody has said about this book.

A six-year-old laughs at a dinosaur eating a classroom because a six-year-old knows it's absurd.

A four-year-old is taking notes on how school works.

Which explains the age-range gap between the publisher and the classroom edition. Same book. Two entirely different experiences.

And one family in the Goodreads pile ran the experiment themselves. Dave Schaafsma reads the Goodreads-nominated picture books with his kids every year. Lyra, 11, gave it 4.5. Hank, 12, gave it 4.5. Harry, 13, gave it 5 and said it was so funny. Tara made the observation that ought to be printed on the back cover: kids would actually like this one, as opposed to some of the other nominees that adults like.

Teenagers still laughing at a picture book about a T. rex is not nothing.

Belly Laugh Scale

5 out of 5: Laugh-Out-Loud Legend

Penelope gets the five.

Not because dinosaurs are automatically funny, and not because eating your classmates is automatically funny.

It's the timing.

Nervous about school. Normal.

Meets the children. Normal.

Eats everybody. Not normal.

And then Higgins keeps mining the same gap for the rest of the book. Penelope wants friends. Penelope also wants to eat the friends. He never runs that joke dry because he keeps finding new pictures for it, right down to the open mouth at the bottom of the slide.

Then the smallest character in the room ends the argument in one bite.

The read-aloud evidence backs it up. A librarian reports a gasp on the same page turn every single time. It won the E.B. White Read Aloud Award, which is specifically an award for books that work out loud.

That's what this scale measures.

Five out of five.

Walter earns half of it by himself.

Final Explorer Verdict

Preschool through early elementary, and especially around the start of a school year.

But read the age ranges with Betsy's warning in mind. For a three or four-year-old this reads more like information than comedy, and that's fine, it's just a different book than the one you think you're buying. From about five up, they're in on the joke and it's a riot.

The nervous kid gets Penelope. The dinosaur kid gets Penelope. And the kid who has ever wondered why somebody won't play with them may get a little more than they expected.

Because Penelope's problem is ridiculous, but the feeling under it isn't.

She wants people to like her.

She hasn't yet worked out that wanting friendship and behaving like a friend have to meet somewhere in the middle.

Preferably without teeth.

I'd use this in a classroom without hesitating. First-day nerves, friendship, personal space, keeping your hands to yourself, what our behavior feels like from the other side. It's all sitting right there.

But read the story first. Laugh at the dinosaur. Let Walter bite her. Talk afterward, if at all.

And if Penelope lands, there's a whole shelf of her now, including one where the class goldfish gets top billing. Walter earned that.

There's a bridge to my own shelf here too. If Penelope's school-day disaster gets your kid laughing, Petey Perfectpants And The Silly Sock Puppet Problem puts a kid in a school situation where making friends gets tangled up in his own behavior. Petey isn't eating anybody. His problem is that he wants everything perfect and loses control of a situation he desperately wanted to control. Different problem, same question underneath: how do I get along with everybody when I'm the one making it harder?

Readit has promised never to eat his classmates.

"Correct."

Good.

"I don't have classmates."

Still counts.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit