Do Not Open This Book! by Michaela Muntean, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre.

As a child, I always adored The Monster at the End of This Book with Grover frantically trying to stop the reader from turning the pages.  Do Not Open This Book has the same feel as a little pig tries to stop the reader from reading the book because it isn’t finished.  He can’t figure out what kind of story to write, scary or bedtime.  He does try hanging word after word, but then the reader turns the page and scrambles them around.  Some of the jokes are straight out of the Grover book with the pig taking a Very Heavy Rock and putting it in the way of page turning. 

That said, this book does cause laughs of its own.  It contains a nasty letter to get the reader to leave where for every blank, you put in your own name.  This caused a lot of laughter with my two sons, and we had to read it over several times using each person’s name in the blanks. 

And on top of it, the book is really about the power of words, the writing process, and humor.  It is a great book to read one-on-one with an emerging reader.  They will be able to see how words go together to form sentences, gain clues to words from the way they are written, and have fun doing it.