This is a pretty cool book, but I'm afraid kids who are old enough to get it will also think they're too old for picture books. It's a little on the informational side, while also being completely wacky and unbelievable. To sum up: a great idea bound to end up in no-man's land. ( )

Billy Twitters' parents have an unusual punishment strategy for Billy: they threaten him with getting him a blue whale. They follow through on the threat, and Billy has to take his whale everywhere with him, take it for walks, play with it, and feed it krill. At last, he decides that life is easier inside the whale than out, as long as he brushes and flosses the whale's baleen, and there's so much space that his new room never looks messy!

Blatantly unrealistic (to humorous effect), this book is nevertheless filled with real facts about whales (their size, what they eat and how). ( )

Normally I just love Barnett and Rex, but I'm not loving this one as much. There's something more going on here than just an exploration of the absurd, but I'm not sure what it is... yes, I understand the references to Moby Dick, Jonah, Pinocchio, but still, there's something deeper...... but then, I don't get Kafka's Metamorphosis, either, and for some reason this reminds me of that. ( )

This fantasy book is a silly example of what could happen if you don't take care of your responsibilities. Billy's mom asks him to keep up on his chores and brush his teeth but he doesn't. So she warns him he will get a blue whale but he does not believe her. The next day a blue whale arrives and Billy must take it everywhere and care for it because it is his responsibility. This is a silly book that would be a great read aloud in a lower grade classroom.

Fed up with his continued refusal to clean his room and finish his baked peas, Billy Twitter's parents make good on their threat to buy him a blue whale. And so begins a hilariously surreal adventure, as Billy struggles to care for his new 100-foot pet, towing him around town on a skateboard, and disrupting his school and social life in the process. Punishment was never so entertaining - for the reader, that is!

Mac Barnett's unconventional narrative, which convinces the reader to accept the absurd as a matter-of-fact reality, is paired with Adam Rex's appealing illustrations. Quirky little visual details abound, from the fact that the faces of the adults are never shown, to the delivery of the whale by "Fed Up," rather than "Fed Ex."

Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem is the kind of book that makes me glad to read reviews. Not because I am anxious to substitute the reviewer's judgment for my own, but because I am sometimes convinced to pick up a title I may otherwise have overlooked, erroneously convinced that it "wasn't for me." How glad I am that this past weekend's New York Times Book Review led me to this delightful picture-book! ( )