The boy who cried "robots!"

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.