WHY DO I HAVE TO MAKE MY BED?
Or, a History of Messy Rooms
by Wade Bradford & illustrated by Johanna van der Sterre
While Bradford never gives kids a satisfying reason as to why they have to make their beds, he does entertain them with an unraveling tale of children in the same predicament. When a young boy in the present day asks why he has to make his bed, his mother begins telling him a story about his grandmother when she was a little girl. After she did her chores, she asked the very same question, which reminded her mother of a story about her grandfather…and so on. From the present day all the way back to 40,000 BCE, the author traces the types of chores children were expected to do, the kinds of playthings they would have had to clean up and the bedding they likely would have slept on. Van der Sterre’s watercolor and digital illustrations manage to portray historical details such as clothing, housing, food, playthings and snippets of daily life while at the same time incorporating humor—no reader will fail to recognize the universally indignant children. A clever history book likely to spark conversations about times gone by. (Picture book. 5-8)