Bad Crab – by Ameilia McInerney and Philip Bunting.

Move over Jaws.

Swim aside Nemo.

There’s a new kid on the block – set to make a splash!

Coming Soon

to a bookstore near you …

BAD CRAB

One shell of a story!

“Get set for one shell of a story,” said the blurb on the back cover, which instantly put me in a fun mood to read this underwater tale. When I say read, I mean look, think, interpret. You see, this story is almost wordless. And, can be left to various interpretations, but one thing is unchanging, and that is how much I love this little crab.

Fiesty Crab. Funny Crab

Crab is everything a great character should be. Sure, he needs to learn to keep his claws to himself, and he may just have learnt that lesson, but he’s feisty, flawed and funny. I want more Crab stories now. The writer and illustrator have done a brilliant job bringing Crab and his buddies to life. I think the term is Visual Literacy. I just call it good storytelling. Because, it does what a lot of good stories do. It encourages thought provoking discussion. I can see some great classroom debates.

Almost no spoiler alert!

As a review of the story itself, I’m not going to tell you what happens, because that would just be my interpretation, you might see it differently and I don’t want to spoil that. I’ve read it several times and got a different point of view each time, particularly with the ending. My son read it and saw it totally different to me. He saw Crab as being friendly all the way through. Where I saw Crab pinching, he saw Crab shaking hands. Go figure.

Bad crab photo with shark - tacos review

I will tell you that there is some high drama to look out for. Holy Mackerel! There’s a hungry shark who wants to eat our main character, and a very pinchy lobster. I’m not sure what kind of a lobster it is, though by the end I get the impression it might be a rock lobster.

And, that’s as much as I can give away. Except to say it is a fun and thought provoking story of a crab and his unshellfish friends who grab life by the claws in a pinchy, punchy underwater adventure.  Ideal for your little nippers. So, don’t flounder. Get to your bookstore and order your copy of Bad Crab today.

Sorry if there are too many sea-creature puns. I didn’t do it on porpoise. Okay, that one I did.

For more details on these amazingly talented book creators, click on their names below.

And, Don’t forget to subscribe for more news, reviews and interviews on all that’s funny in kid’s books. Like this joke: Why did the crab cross the road? To get to the other tide. He-he-he-he. There’s more where that came from. Okay, so don’t subscribe then.

Details:

Author: Amelia McInerney

Illustrator: Philip Bunting

Publisher: Omnibus Books, Scholastic Australia, July 2019

Other books by McInerney and Bunting reviewed here at Tacos

The Book Chook

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