DEBUG THIS BOOK

In this interactive picture book, a boy who’s trying to troubleshoot a computer bug turns to readers for help.

Cody—a brown-skinned child with short, rust-colored hair and periwinkle glasses—sits at a desk in front of a computer monitor and says to readers, “You’re just in time! I’ve just finished a magnificent story for you…full of exhilarating adventure, stellar superheroes, and—” Uh-oh. A tiny, winged creature can be seen messing with the wallpaperlike running text that suddenly appears behind Cody. “It looks like…a bug!” he laments. “My book is BROKEN!” Several adults, diverse in skin tone, show up, among them an exterminator ready to spray insecticide and a handyperson prepared to fix what’s “broken.” These grown-ups bring chaos, not a solution. Cody has no choice but to turn back to readers: “Think you could erase the bug? Try shooing it away with your hand.” Cody continues to issue instructions. It’s all very meta and cacophonous, although Abed’s main intention is to educate: An author’s note promotes the idea that the source of a problem like Cody’s is usually “something common or obvious”—like, say, the beverage that, we learn at book’s end, spilled from Cody’s juice box onto his computer keyboard (oopsie). Rowan-Zoch’s cartoonish illustrations—created digitally, of course—play out on eye-pleasing lavender backdrops that add some calm to the book’s general noisiness.

Hectic but great fun.