August 12, 2019
Making friends isn’t always easy. From the moment poor Fart slips “silently, invisibly” into the world, he’s excited to make friends. There’s just one problem: he quite literally stinks. As the green cloud sails through the air, from a home (“Da-ad! That smells so gross!”) to a world filled with “sweet fragrances” (garbage, smog), his overtures of friendship flop (“Someone’s been cooking air biscuits”). Finally, Fart shamefacedly realizes that he is the stench everyone has been complaining about. Embarrassed and despondent, he drifts into an alley, where he encounters his favorite garbage smells and another personified bodily emission, also down in the dumps, who becomes his gaseous soulmate. Blake fully exploits her wacky premise (offering a true wealth of fart epithets) and, alongside contemporary illustrations by Nickel, shows that even a little fart can drum up big affection. Ages 3–7.