It's Not Easy Being Number Three
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The Number Three is having an identity crisis-there are so many other things he could do with his life; why stop at being just a number? He tries being a ship's anchor, a spatula, even a shiny bronze sculpture, and he won't listen when the other numbers beg him to come back to the lineup. But after awhile, Number Three starts to realize that what he enjoys most is the job no one else can do: being the Number Three.
It's Not Easy Being Number Three is a clever book that celebrates the importance of feeling appreciated for one's talents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dernavich, a New Yorker cartoonist with a distinctively angular and chunky scratchboard style, makes his children's book debut with an offbeat story of a numeral in search of a meaningful existence. Number Three "doesn't want to be a number anymore," so he leaves the quantifying life behind (and his fellow numbers in the lurch) to explore life as a shape. Dernavich has fun seeing threes in all kinds of places (like the steering wheel of an airplane), and there's an enjoyable seek-and-find aspect to the story as readers locate Three standing in for the toes of an elephant, the loops of a shoelace, the hooks of a coatrack, and more. Three's career explorations start to drag on after a while, but the conceit comes together in the final pages, when Three goes undercover and discovers, la It's a Wonderful Life, that the world without him is a pretty bleak place. By book's end, the poker-faced quality of Dernavich's renderings makes the possibility of an entirely numberless existence feel fresh and funny. Ages 3 7.
