One Day, The End.: Short, Very Short, Shorter-Than-Ever Stories

It's a collection of extremely short stories all starring a little girl. For example, one of them consists entirely of "One day... I went to school. I came home. The end." But the illustration of the story, combined with the terrific text layout, adds so much more. The letters are gigantic, and the little girl follows a cat through the letters of "I went". In the word "to", she's late for class and is running past a bunch of lockers towards a rather upset-looking teacher. The word "school" is spattered with a pink liquid and she's nearby in a science class pouring a blue liquid into a pink liquid (unlike the rest of the class, who are all pouring a blue liquid into another blue liquid; she's the only one without a book as she misplaced them following the cat). In the next page, she's walking dejectedly home. Then word "came" is written on the side of an ice-cream truck which she is chasing, her hand full of money, and by the word "home" she and her dog see that her ice cream has fallen out of the cone, and on the period at the end she is sitting, eating the ice cream, having presumably picked it up off the ground with her hands. The dog sits there, looking like he wants to try some. The real story is told via this illustration, which is really cool. It makes me wonder how closely the author and artist worked together in these stories.

I feel like it would inspire the children being read to to look and find all the things that are happening to this girl. It's almost like a graphic novel without panels, just a sequence of things happening on every page, following the text. In many cases, the reader is following the text and the girl is doing various things in all the corners of the page. There's so much more to these stories than just the text. The first page, before any of the stories, says, "For every story there is a beginning and an end, but what happens in between makes all the difference."

It's a very playful, imaginative book, and you know most of the stuff that happens is the kind of thing that might happen to a young girl going through her day or in the different parts of her life. I really like how the author and illustrator team worked together here, and I'd love to see some behind-the-scenes information on how they did it! What did the author tell the illustrator beyond the words on the page? I really enjoyed this book.