Eppie M. Says.

by Dunrea, Olivier. (Simon and Schuster, 1990 ISBN 0027332055. Out of Print.) Picture Book. 32 pages. Grades PreK+.
This book was reviewed by Carol Otis Hurst in Teaching K-8 Magazine.

Review

Eppie M.'s Gran says Eppie is a regular Miss Know-It-All, and her brother Ben Salem agrees, only he takes the comment without sarcasm. After all Eppie M. knows how to read and he thinks she's the smartest person in the whole wide world. He professes to believe everything she says, including that if you swallow a live minnow you'll know how to swim, if you walk backwards you'll end up in Australia and that babies are dropped from the sky. However, as he tests out many of her pronouncements, he finds some of them true, some of them untrue and, for some of them, he concludes that he doesn't have enough information. (All that is good scientific procedure, by the way.) Still, his faith in Eppie M. is undiminished.

The hand-lettered text adds to the angular, visual appeal of the book. Dunrea's illustrations of eggs with legs, false teeth hanging from the clothesline and people floating by, including a woman reading a book entitled "Floating You Can Do It", present visual clues for many other things Eppie M might have said.

This is a book readers will want to pore over, digging out more and more absurdities and then making up some preposterous explanations of their own.

Related Areas of Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site

• Math and Picture Books, Data Gathering, including the use of Eppie M. Says...