Terrible, Horrible, No good, Very bad Day

Reading List
Written By Rebecca Grabill

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1972.

Viorst respects the child’s world; her protagonist wakes up grumpy, gum in his hair, and as the day continues everything else seems to go so wrong the boy wants to move to Australia. Rather than trivialize the child’s struggles with a happy ending, Viorst simply closes with, “Some days are like that. Even in Australia.”

The examples of upsetting events are realistic and varied and the line drawings compliment the text. Their black and white simplicity at first struck me as boring, but as I read I realized how the lack of color draws attention to the details in each piece of artwork—facial expressions, textures. This was a childhood favorite, and it still draws me in, after all these years.

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Rebecca Grabill

Rebecca has been writing since childhood, her first book about a kitten published between homemade cardboard covers in second grade. Although she studied religion and philosophy in university, she continued writing, earning an MFA from Hamline University and publishing multiple picture books (no longer with homemade covers) and a collection of poetry with a variety of New York and independent publishers. She has also published a wide array of fiction, essays, and poetry in magazines and journals and photographs for Getty Images. She balances writing with homeschooling the younger of her six children, launching her young adults, church activities, and overseeing a small flock of chickens in rural West Michigan.

www.rebeccagrabill.com
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