The Book That No One Wanted to Read
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From actor-author-broadcaster-comedian-filmmaker Richard Ayoade comes a book narrated by . . . a book. Quirky, smart, and genre-busting, this is the saga of a book that nobody wants to read—until the day it meets YOU. The life of a book isn’t easy, especially when people judge you by your cover (not every book can be adorned with sparkly unicorns!). And this narrator should know—it’s the book itself, and it has a lot of opinions. It gets irritated when readers bend its pages back, and it finds authors quite annoying. But it does have a story to tell. Through witty direct address and charming illustrations, readers meet a book that has never been read, with a cover the boring color of a school lunch table and pages so dry they give bookworms indigestion. But what happens when this book meets you, a curious reader? Multitalented author Richard Ayoade and award-winning illustrator Tor Freeman bring to life a hilariously subversive take on the nature of books and reading, with a heartening theme of finding the courage to tell our own stories. Readers of all ages will be delighted by the myriad bookish references and laughs on every page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British performer Ayoade kicks off this telling with a P.G. Wodehouse epigraph, setting the tone for a jocose metafictional narrative told from a book's point of view. An audience-directed first-person framing chapter introduces the narrator ("Oh yes./ I'm a book./ Hello") before diving into several pages' worth of observations regarding texts and readers (judging books by their covers, people who dog-ear pages) as well as notes about volumes' utility (like delivery vehicles, they're "a packed truck"). When the second chapter picks up the main narrative, it traces the second-person story of a nonspecific child ("you") who finds The Book That No One Wanted to Read on a high library shelf and establishes telepathic communication with it. Slowly, the initially repressed Book begins to reveal deep, complex feelings, and together with the child who discovers it, begins to explore the idea of collaborating on a new storytelling project, making for an idiosyncratically charming read. Alongside diagrams, graphs, and lengthy chapter titles, whimsical cartooning from Freeman (Good Dogs on a Bad Day) visualizes humans of varying skin tones throughout. Ages 10–14.