I DO NOT LIKE STORIES

A grouchy reader finally finds an appealing topic.

“I do not like stories about waking up in the morning,” begins the light-skinned, dark-haired grump. Once off to school, the child continues to enumerate every single kind of disliked story on the left side of the double-page spreads while the right-hand page shows the family’s cat having parallel experiences: upsetting a fruit cart when the child expresses disdain for stories about fruit, climbing a tree when the kid says, “I do not like stories about deep dark forests,” and reentering the apartment through a window as the child reviles “stories about going home.” Comic-book–style panels divide the action while the muted, blue-dominated palette and simple lines of the illustrations match the downcast tone of the story. The only break in the repetitive structure is when the kid says, “I do not like stories about monsters that hide behind closed doors,” and then, after a bewhiskered, spread-spanning “BOO,” says, “Just kidding! That’s no monster. That’s my cat.” The kid only concedes, at the end, the possibility of “lik[ing] a story about a cat.” The story has a pleasant, soothing rhythm, but it never manages to get anywhere interesting. There’s no insight into why the antihero is so pessimistic, and the cat’s side-plot adventures are too mundane to entertain or offer a counternarrative.

Anti-book books are tricky, and this one doesn’t quite pull it off.