My Worst Book Ever

Ahlberg and Ingman (Hooray for Bread) continue their comic streak with a memoir of sorts about bookmaking gone wrong. Addressing readers as if they're right there with him, Ahlberg lays out the catastrophe. While his story about a crocodile pleases him ("Billy Brown boating/ Brave little chap/ Crocodile floating/ Crocodile... Snap!") his drawings get smudged and stained; Bruce, his illustrator, lobbies for a hippo instead of a crocodile. Worst of all, Lucy--his printer's four-year-old daughter--rearranges the book's pages to her liking before they are bound. Her handiwork is revealed in a grand and ambitious gatefold, with the book as Ahlberg intended it on the left and Lucy's version on the right. Pages are upside down, a hippo intrudes, and one page is in Chinese. Ahlberg's confiding, self-deprecating tone provides smiles for anyone who has wrestled with the creative process ("I was gripping my pencil so hard I had to go up to the house and have a chocolate biscuit to calm me down"). It's an entertaining sketch of how books get made and sometimes veer off course. Ages 5-up. (Apr.)