The Worst Breakfast

August 22, 2016
Miéville (Railsea) lets it rip in this stomping, howling rant about a bad meal of legendary proportions. “You can’t have forgotten the worst breakfast!” cries the older of two dark-skinned sisters sitting at the kitchen table. “The toast was burnt! The smell!/ The smoke! It made us choke!” The younger sister’s admission that she doesn’t remember merely spurs the older one on. “And the porridge!... It should be creamy, made of oats,/ not gunk scraped off the hulls of boats.” The festival of gustatory horrors builds to a page-long litany of medieval-sounding (but real) dishes: “Salmagundi, gruel, stinking bishop, and liver.... syllabub, muktuk, and limpin’ Susan.” Punk artist Smith’s neatly framed dialogue boxes and crisp black contours have a buttoned-up look, but no: tentacles wave from inside bowls, monsters smile amid mountains of vile sausages, and a blue alien juggles cherry tomatoes. As the pages turn, the towers of bad food grow ever loftier. In the end, a simple tea strainer saves the sisters from another terrible meal. This one’s for families enamored of new words, exotic foods, and strong opinions. Ages 3–7.

A young black girl tells her little sister that the breakfast before them reminds her of the worst breakfast, but her sister has no recollection of that terrible meal. Incredulous, the girl tells her sister all about the most disgusting of breakfasts, though this still doesn't ring a bell. So she spins a larger and larger tale, each piece of food more awful than the last. Mieville and Smith's dialogue is fantastic: witty, smart, with great rhythm that doesn't sacrifice artful turns of phrase to reach for an internal rhyme. "It gummed my throat and chilled my soul. Too much cheese. Not enough hole," the girl says of some inferior Swiss cheese. Smith's artwork keeps pace with the text, which the artist sets into little rectangles to contrast with the jaggedly flamboyant paintings that get increasingly manic as the girl goes on, incorporating tentacles and pterodactyls as well as piled-high foodstuffs. Both Mieville and Smith are well-known for their work for adults, and this will certainly appeal to their fans who are parents. But this should be in the hands of all kids who aren't easily satiated by tamer picture books and who would engage with a real work of art that they can revisit over and over. None of the artwork is too gross to behold, even for the squeamish, but it does perfectly illustrate the culinary horrors the girl is trying to convey to her sister. A brilliant, original, infinitely rereadable book that can sit alongside Sendak and Dahl. (Picture book. 3 & up) COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2017

K-Gr 3-The usual breakfast routine takes a wonderfully odd turn one day. Two unnamed sisters sit around the table one morning and recall the worst breakfast they've ever had. What starts out with tales of burning toast turns into accounts of "steaming slick tomatoes oozing into RANCID swill." The descriptions of this bizarre meal become increasingly more grotesque, causing the sisters to dread their upcoming breakfast. Then, out of the giant cracked eggs emerge dinosaurlike creatures that create havoc in the kitchen. The honey attracts large, menacing bees. The sausages multiply and become food for the octopuses, squid, and other creatures feasting on the gnarly meal. The over-the-top descriptions reflect young kids' tendency to exaggerate. Eventually, the sisters realize that their meal is not that bad and are grateful for the food in front of them. Mieville, known for his genre-defying fantasy novels for adults, makes a splash with his picture book debut. Smith's illustrations, filled with geometric shapes and patterns, are the perfect complement to the text, although younger readers may have a hard time making out what's happening in the frenetic mixed-media images. VERDICT Perhaps not a first purchase, this is a subversive delight for those younger readers prone to embellishment.-Christopher Lassen, BookOps: The New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library

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