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SEVEN RULES YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT BREAK IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE THE CAFETERIA by John Grandits

SEVEN RULES YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT BREAK IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE THE CAFETERIA

by John Grandits ; illustrated by Michael Allen Austin

Pub Date: June 27th, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-69951-9
Publisher: Clarion Books

Grandits and Austin team up again to bring readers more school rules that they should (not!) follow.

Kyle, who survived breaking all Ten Rules You Absolutely Must Not Break if You Want to Survive the School Bus (2011), is older now—the bespectacled white lad’s got new interests, mainly all things insect—but he still worries about following the rules. So when a girl on his bus learns he is buying lunch for the first time (horrors!), he follows her advice and takes notes. Will he manage to survive breaking all seven rules, as is inevitable? While some of these rules will be helpful to the elementary or middle school set navigating the lunchroom, others humorously debunk their what-ifs by showing Kyle surviving the worst. They range from not holding up the line or taking too much to remembering to pay, sitting with your classmates (certainly not with the big kids!), and holding onto your tray. Austin’s acrylic, colored pencil, and digital illustrations both wonderfully portray Kyle’s every emotion and hysterically show his imagined metaphors: his class is a column of hungry ants, the lunch lady is an easily annoyed fly on the lookout for trouble, and the sixth-grade bully and his friends are carnivorous water bugs. Refreshingly, the book skips the cliché that school lunches are necessarily bad; the food looks appetizing, and Kyle states it’s very good.

Some solid advice about both the cafeteria and life is embedded in this tongue-in-cheek tale.

(Picture book. 5-10)