The boy who cried "robots!"

K-Gr 3--The boy who cried wolf is an old story straight out of Aesop's fables, and this graphic adaptation, while visually playful and cumulatively comedic, doesn't stray too far from the familiar premise. Sam is a serial fabulist, declaring that a monster ate his homework (cue a cartoonishly gargantuan gobbling gremlin) and that alligators are preventing him from his nightly bath (humorously huge reptiles crammed into a clawfoot tub). Everyone he knows is sick of it, and Sam, in turn, opts to take a sick day to sulk at home. But when he calls his school to report his absence, he makes up his biggest bluff yet: robots with rockets are ransacking his house. The school secretary believes him, the principal calls the fire department, and a swarm of support vans--ambulances, astronauts, news crews, and even food trucks--arrive on the scene only to find Sam surprised to see them. He's gently reprimanded and washes their vehicles in reparation for the error of his ways. The consequences of Sam's behavior are significantly lighter than the original fable's violent end, and the book gets its greatest joy from imagining the immensity of Sam's fabrications. Sparse, simple narration and mostly brief speech bubbles are encouraging and accessible for hesitant readers. Sam is white with blond hair. VERDICT This is an eminently easy to read, pleasantly jokey comic perfect for a quick laugh for young readers.--Emilia Packard

A humorous contemporary twist on the old story of the boy who cried "Wolf!" On nearly every page of this tale, light-skinned, orange-haired Sam's rather cavernous mouth gapes open as he laughs loudly at his own lies. His falsehoods start small but rapidly intensify--from his declaration to readers that his bike is yellow (it's in fact blue) to his claim that a big hairy monster ate his homework to his excuse for not bathing (the tub has been invaded by gators). Sam's fed-up classmates start avoiding him, and he decides to tell a whopper of a lie so he can stay home from school: "Evil space ROBOTS with fire-shooting eyeballs…are attacking my house!" The very funny result is much lighter--and goofier--than that of Aesop's traditional fable, but the moral remains. Part of a series intended to "instill confidence and the joy of reading in new readers," this graphic novel features speech bubbles and bright, funny, frenzied-looking art, giving youngsters plenty of visual help in making sense of the text. The sentences and phrases are short, with random vocabulary words poised to enter a new reader's collection of sight words. At one point, when Sam's classmates are rightly annoyed at his fibs, one of them uses the ableist wordlame. A witty and entertaining cautionary tale.(Graphic early reader. 5-8) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.