Little Red Writing

K-Gr 2—Written with wit, humor, and puns galore, this fractured fairy tale features Little Red, a pencil in search of a story. Given a writing assignment by her teacher Ms. 2, Little Red travels down the story path with a basket of red nouns looking for the kind of tale that will allow her to display bravery and fight evil, "because red is the color of courage. But what would a brave pencil do?" As she journeys around the school, she encounters action words at the gym, descriptive words at the library, etc., until she comes across a long tangly tail that is up to no good. Brave Little Red follows it into Principal Granny's office where she comes upon the Wolf 3000, "the grumpiest, growliest, grindingest pencil sharpener ever made!" This is a book so rich in words and wry humor-written and visual-that one reading just isn't enough. Imagine kids running to the dictionary to look up "bosky" and "tenebrous" after getting bogged down in the dark, descriptive forest (the school library) or poring over Sweet's characteristically engaging watercolor, pencil, and collage illustrations for delicious details, such as the pencil school newspaper with the motto "We get to the point." These pictures don't merely enhance Holub's clever text, they become a part of it through the use of layered papers upon which the dialogue is literally written in pencil. Little Red's classmates run the gamut of childhood types, each distinguished by its individualized eraser. Creative and fun, this book works equally well for storytime or story writing. Pair it with Janet Stevens's The Little Red Pen (Houghton, 2011) for the full gamut of school-supplies silliness.—Teri Markson, Los Angeles Public Library