Butterflies in My Stomach and Other School Hazards - Hardcover

Serge Bloch has won a gold medal at the Society of Illustrators and creates editorial art for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. He divides his time between New York and his native France.

Grade 2–4—A nameless little boy braves the first day of school in this crisply illustrated picture book. The text is a series of idioms that take him through the day, from waking up "on the wrong side of the bed," to having a "long face" at lunch, to being "happy as a puppy with two tails" when he finally comes home to his dog. The illustrations interpret each idiom literally, often to comic effect: "we'd be in a real pickle if we missed the bus" is accompanied by a pickle-as-bus picture, while meeting the "Big Cheese" shows a principal wearing a dress made of Swiss cheese. Bloch's graphic style incorporates photographs of objects into pen-and-ink drawings, and the copious use of white space keeps the focus squarely on the words and their visual interpretations. Wallace Edwards's Monkey Business (Kids Can, 2004) covers similar territory, but with a much more elaborate illustration style that goes more for humor than understanding. Here, Bloch's simple though imaginative pictures and clean visual style invite discussion of the deeper meanings of these oft-used phrases, making this an ideal book for the classroom or for one-on-one sharing.—Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD
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