The Book That No One Wanted to Read

February 6, 2023
British performer Ayoade kicks off this telling with a P.G. Wodehouse epigraph, setting the tone for a jocose metafictional narrative told from a book’s point of view. An audience-directed first-person framing chapter introduces the narrator (“Oh yes./ I’m a book./ Hello”) before diving into several pages’ worth of observations regarding texts and readers (judging books by their covers, people who dog-ear pages) as well as notes about volumes’ utility (like delivery vehicles, they’re “a packed truck”). When the second chapter picks up the main narrative, it traces the second-person story of a nonspecific child (“you”) who finds The Book That No One Wanted to Read on a high library shelf and establishes telepathic communication with it. Slowly, the initially repressed Book begins to reveal deep, complex feelings, and together with the child who discovers it, begins to explore the idea of collaborating on a new storytelling project, making for an idiosyncratically charming read. Alongside diagrams, graphs, and lengthy chapter titles, whimsical cartooning from Freeman (Good Dogs on a Bad Day) visualizes humans of varying skin tones throughout. Ages 10–14.