Laurel Snyder

Wow!  My first really BAD review!

Ethelmae, who is forced to work at the bug-infested diner for stealing a single lemon drop, shares vignettes about events at the disgusting eatery. Once, the booths became so greasy, they slid outside of the restaurant into the street. The diners kept right on eating and were never heard from again. The waitresses pinch the customers, and the chocolate milk isn’t really chocolate. The narrator leads her friend to a secret room where goodbyes are banned. “Wouldn’t you like a lemon drop…. Have one. They’re delicious.” The story is confusing and further muddled by the sentence structure, e.g., “Inside the Slidy Diner, the noise is always.” While the drawings make great use of detail and color, they seem only to add to the murkiness of the narrative. It would be difficult to find an audience for this book.—Beth Cuddy, Seward Elementary School, Auburn, NY

I suppose it had to happen. Might as well happen now.

And it is some consolation that Beth Cuddy did such a poor job of reading the book she mixed up Edie (the little girl) with Ethelmae (the creepy  grill cook).  Also, she neglected to put several of the quotes in quotation marks, which makes the review itself hard to read.

If you’re going to be roundly trashed, it’s nice when the person doing the trashing reveals themselves to be a sloppy reader and writer from the jump.

Though I do wonder why SLJ didn’t fact-check the review. When I write for PW they’re sticklers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.