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FROM OUR EDITORS

Oh no! A little boy discovers that his body is falling apart! Already, at age five, he finds two hairs in his comb. And the lint in his bellybutton? Certainly that means his stuffing is coming out! Perhaps if he sneezes, he will lose his head. Luckily, the boy's farfetched fears are allayed by his parents. Arnold's cartoonlike rhymes will have readers in stitches.

ANNOTATION

A five-year-old boy thinks his body is falling apart untill he learns new teeth grow and hair and skin replace themselves.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

First, his hair started falling out. Then skin started peeling from his toes. Some stuffing came out of his belly button, and a piece of something gray and wet-his brain?-fell out of his nose. Is this normal? Or is this boy coming unglued? With a perfect combination of humor and grossness, this look at one boy's farfetched fears will have readers laughing their heads off!

"A zany, ultimately reassuring take on something that may indeed be a child's bugaboo." -Booklist

Awards:
( 1999 Colorado Children's Book Award
( Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Award Masterlist

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In this humorously askew look at the body, belly-button lint leads a five-year-old boy to believe he's falling apart. "I stared at it, amazed, and wondered,/ What's this all about?/ But then I understood. It was/ My stuffing coming out!" Each discovery increases the narrator's anxiety. Strands of hair in a comb arouse thoughts of premature baldness; "a chunk of something gray and wet," fallen from a nostril, is identified as "a little piece of brain." (Attempting to find answers, the young hypochondriac pores over a stack of books on gray matter, including a "Book of Marbles" for those losing theirs.) The boy's parents insist that nose goo and flaky skin are normal, but their solemn reassurance is met with a gross punch line: "Then tell me, what's this yellow stuff I got out of my ear?" Whimsical cartoons, in warm watercolor hues and texturized with squiggles of colored pencil that resemble the boy's decreasing hairs, show the narrator in the foreground and his worst fantasies in the background. The subject matter, despite its potential to be disgusting, is treated as funny but commonplace. Trying to make sense of one's "parts" is a common childhood concern, and Arnold's (No More Water in the Tub!) comical hyperbole will set children at ease about fears they might hesitate to share. Ages 3-8. (Sept.)

Children's Literature - Marilyn Courtot

Imagine you are just a young kid and when you see some fluff in your bellybutton, its panic time, because of course all of your stuffing must be coming out. Arnold in his own inimitable style with a bug-eyed big headed kid goes over all the concerns of growing up and the accompanying loss of hair, skin, and teeth. Our young boy's parents, parenting manual in hand, reassure him that its all normal and there is nothing to fear. It is funny and some kids will be reassured while the more sophisticated ones will be amused.

Kirkus Reviews

Arnold (The Simple People, 1992, etc.) cashes in by grossing out the picture-book set in this story in rhyme, which kids with rough-and-ready sensibilities will relish and fastidious adults will shun, for the same reasons.

The goggle-eyed narrator has noticed that he loses hairs, his skin peels, and a tooth is loose, not to mention his discoveries of belly-button lint and nose yuck. He comes to the alarming conclusion that he's going bald and toothless, shedding his skin, losing his stuffing, and his brains are leaking out his nose. His parents reassure him that all these lost parts renew themselves. His response: "That's really good to hear! Then tell me, what's this yellow stuff I got out of my ear?" Stupid, silly, and base, in equal measure, this has watercolor illustrations that are textured with colored-pencil curlicues in such a way that they look hairy—like the tangles that clog a shower drain.