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Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World)
By Mac Barnett
Illustrated by Dan Santat
Hyperion Books
$16.99
ISBN: 978-142312312-5
Ages 4 and up.
On shelves now.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a name for this new breed of children’s book author/illustrator we’re seeing these days. It’s a genre without a name. We’re seeing a lot of picture books these days that engage kids, but also turn on their heads classic picture book forms. It started with books like The Stinky Cheese Man and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and now includes titles like Pssst! or The Purple Kangaroo or Guess Again!. Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World) is just the latest addition to a fast growing genre hereby dubbed Juvie Satire, and it is the creation of two of the genre’s kings. Author Mac Barnett burst on the children’s literary scene running as fast as his legs could take him, and illustrator Dan Santat glides right along side him, painting every dog, cat, and chicken that happens to cross his path. Alone, they are impressive. Combined, they may well be either unstoppable or too wacked out for the average child’s mind to handle. Let’s hope for the former.

We enter this story midway through the action. As our heroine says, “Oh no . . . oh, man . . . I knew it.” Next thing we know she’s facing the retreating back of a mechanical wonder on the rampage. Says she, “I never should have built a robot for the science fair.” Flashback to her winning the top prize at the science fair, just as her creation bursts through the gym wall to cause a little mass destruction. Feeling just a twinge guilty about the whole thing (and unable to stop her robot herself), our heroine returns home and turns a small toad into a robot fighting monstrosity. This goes well, the robot is destroyed, and the mayor of the city is very pleased with the solution . . . that is, until the toad takes off after seeing a tasty airplane fly by.

I once interviewed Mr. Barnett about his writing and he had some interesting things to say on the subject of kids and their remarkable inability to feel bad about massive foibles. In terms of this book Mr. Barnett said, “I wanted to write about a very particular kind of regret that only children can feel: a regret that is sincere but also usually less acute than the situation warrants. I’m thinking particularly of an episode at 826LA, a nonprofit writing center I used to run. I walked into the bathroom to find a kid who’d flushed many paper towels down a toile