Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Title: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Author: Judith Viorst

Genre: Picture Book

Publisher: Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing

Copyright Date: 1987

Pages in Book: 32 pages

Reading Level: 5-9 years

Summary: Alexander is a young boy that just has an absolutely horrible day. The moment that he wakes up, he finds gum in his hair. He doesn’t find a treat in his cereal, doesn’t get a window seat on the way to school, gets yelled at during school, ditched by his best friend, and has no dessert for lunch. And that’s just the beginning. Everything continues to go wrong, and Alexander hopes that by going home, it would make the day just a little bit better. But he’s wrong. He gets home and has food (lima beans) which he hates, can’t find anything good on TV., and goes to bed wearing his railroad pajama’s (ones that he hates). All he wants to do is move to Australia and get away from a place where he has horrible days.

Reaction: I thought the book was good, but slightly depressing. I doubt that even people in real life have days like this, where not a single thing goes right. It was well written, but I didn’t like the illustrations very much, and just overall wasn’t very impressed with the book.

Recommendation: Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend this book to many children. Maybe if the child was having a bad day, I’d read it to them, to let them know that their life isn’t that bad, but other than that reasoning, I doubt that I would recommend it to anyone.

Potential Problems/Conflicts: I just didn’t like how everything was going wrong, and how his result for solving all his problems was to run away. That’s not the answer, and I don’t want other readers to think that that’s the way to get away from your problems, or how to solve them. Because that’s just not how it works.