One Day, the End: Short, Very Short, Shorter-than-Ever Stories

PreS-Gr 1—A series of cleverly crafted tales involving a precocious girl doing ordinary things in a creative and energetic manner. Nine "shorter-than-ever" stories of a dozen words or less become considerably more sophisticated when readers delve into Koehler's dynamic cartoon illustrations. While brief, the text plays an integral role in each story. The first tale reads "One day…I went to school. I came home. The end." This spread shows the narrator involved in six different activities, including climbing over the letters of the word went while chasing a cat. Dotlich and Koehler are ideally teamed and offer a genius method of encouraging narrative dialogue, as well as attention to text. Not quite wordless, each simple story sets the stage for the illustrated adventures, which tell the rest of the story. The colorful images represent nine individual tales, yet there is a cohesiveness among them, with images linking back to earlier tales.