The New York Times Book Review - Maria Russo
Lloyd-Jones…and Roberts…take the baby-as-royal-tyrant trope out for an exhilarating spin.
Publishers Weekly
★ 07/03/2017
This displacement-themed fairy tale spoof is funny from the very first page, when Lloyd-Jones (Baby Wren and the Great Gift) introduces her fantasizing heroine as “the most beautifulest, cleverest, ever-so-kindest Princess with long, flowing wondrous hair,” and Roberts (Ada Twist, Scientist) shows her wearing yellow tights on her head in an approximation of golden tresses. But happily-ever-after goes out the window with the arrival of a smelly, attention-grabbing baby brother, aka King Baby. As the girl bemoans her fate in storybook-style narration, the sly pen-and-watercolor pictures provide delicious comic counterpoint, from the 1970s-retro detailing (a wicker peacock chair stands in as throne) to panel sequences that mirror Roberts’s crisp images with crayon-scrawled ones that reflect the girl’s version of events. It takes the meltdown of King Baby at his first birthday party to trigger two epiphanies: she has magical powers to soothe him, and l’état, c’est moi can be true of brother-sister rulers. Comparisons to Kate Beaton’s King Baby and Marla Frazee’s The Boss Baby are natural, but Lloyd-Jones and Roberts’s satire stands on its own. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Elizabeth Harding, Curtis Brown. Illustrator’s agency: Artist Partners. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Has there ever been a baby as wicked as this one? Lloyd-Jones (‘How to Be a Baby … by Me, the Big Sister’) and Roberts (‘Rosie Revere, Engineer’) take the baby-as-royal-tyrant trope out for an exhilarating spin.
—The New York Times Book Review
This displacement-themed fairy tale spoof is funny from the very first page...Comparisons to Kate Beaton’s King Baby and Marla Frazee’s The Boss Baby are natural, but Lloyd-Jones and Roberts’s satire stands on its own.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Roberts’ lively mixed-media illustrations humorously play out the sister’s exaggerated version of the events, from the deeply expressive faces to the dense compositions packed with comical details...Many older siblings will relate to this uproarious tale of new-baby mayhem.
—Booklist Online
The newly minted big sister describes, in a classic-fairy-tale narrative style, the havoc wreaked by her demanding baby brother. Even better, she draws the story as she sees it, in entertaining childlike illustrations that mirror—and sometimes humorously deviate from—Roberts’s watercolor and pen art showing the book’s true events.
—The Horn Book
'Early one morning, a mouse met a wolf, and he was quickly gobbled up.’ It’s a grim start for a picture book, but children acquainted with Jon Klassen’s deadpan illustrations will expect nothing less from ‘The Wolf, the Duck & the Mouse.’ Of course, the mouse gets gobbled. Gobbling, as 4- to 8-year-olds know from ‘I Want My Hat Back’ (2011) and ‘This Is Not My Hat’ (2012), is a Klassen specialty. Ah, but being swallowed by a wolf is only the beginning of the mouse’s adventures in this terrific tale by Mac Barnett.
—The Wall Street Journal
A great book for children with younger “royal” siblings or those who are about to have one.
—School Library Journal
A royal serving of fun for the new-baby shelf.
—Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2017-07-02
A big sister's nose is out of joint when her baby brother arrives and makes a royal mess of what she regarded as her once-ideal life. First-person text establishes "the most beautifulest, cleverest, ever-so-kindest Princess with long, flowing wondrous hair" as the narrator of this new-baby story. Illustrations amplify the flowery text's humor by depicting the white girl with bobbed hair and wearing a pair of yellow tights on her head to emulate Rapunzel-like locks. After King Baby, who is also white though initially hairless, arrives, parallel series of panel illustrations, one rendered in the cartoon style of the main book, the other in a naïve style that suggests a child's hand, detail the ways that the baby disrupts her happy life with his pooping, burping, attention-hogging ways. The worst arrives with his first birthday, which she decides to interrupt "disguised as a Mysterious Fairy, with a magic wand, a big very magical nose, and a cunning plan…." But before she can put her plan into action, the baby is overwhelmed by the party guests' singing and attention and begins to cry. Who can soothe him? Only his big sister, of course. She's now a "Kind Fairy [whose] loveliness had grown even stronger (like a sparkling mountain stream)." And, yes, following this act of sisterly kindness, "They Lived Happily Ever After—THE END…." A royal serving of fun for the new-baby shelf. (Picture book. 3-7)
