What About Worms!? [Elephant & Piggie Like Reading!]
by Ryan T. Higgins; illus. by the author; with additional illustrations by Mo Willems
Primary    Hyperion    64 pp.    g
5/20    978-1-368-04573-5    $9.99

Tiger is BIG. Tiger is BRAVE. Tiger is afraid of nothing...“except worms.” Tiger, a plush Calvin and Hobbes-ian animal with no taste for subtlety, tells us just what makes these creatures so terrifying: “Worms are slimy. Worms like to wiggle. And you cannot tell their tops from their bottoms!” Tiger is momentarily distracted from its fear by, successively, pretty flowers, an apple, and a book, but the remembered possibility of worms at every turn (“Flowers grow in dirt…Worms love dirt…”) sends Tiger screaming. In an entertaining twist, some tiger-fearing worms get over their own apprehensions to help with Tiger’s phobia: “Let’s give that nice tiger a worm hug!” Tiger’s overblown reactions make for hilarious page-turns in Higgins’s high-action illustrations. Early readers will find support in the repetitive text and relish the many exclamations and sound effects (“CRRR-UNCH!”). Framed by two spreads of groan-inducing puns from Willems’s Elephant and Piggie, Higgins’s easy reader is funny from top to bottom.

From the May/June 2020 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.