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BREEDING CONTEMPT
The Worst Book I’ve Ever Read Was Written By a Great Author
Don’t read it to your kid, Mister
As a mom of six, I’ve read thousands of books to my children.
And, when you’re reading a bedtime story out loud, you’re not expecting Steinbeck. (This is not a dig at kid lit; children’s books seem incredibly hard to write.) But one book stands out as the actual worst —
Mister Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself, by Margaret Wise Brown.
What the hell happened?
This book had everything going for it. It’s a Little Golden, recognizable on a shelf from 10 yards or more with its lamé spine. A vetted “classic.” Illustrated by Garth Williams of the Little House series, it should be doe-eyed, sentimental, and beloved.
But Mister Dog has neither eyes nor head nor wagging tail.
You see its headlessness from the very first sentence. The protagonist’s name is… (are you ready for this?)… Crispin’s Crispian. If Margaret Wise Brown had drafted this anytime after the turn of the millennium and I were her editor, I’d have sent her straight to a baby names site to find something else to call poor Mister Dog — something without a first name that’s almost the same as its last.