I am going to be brutally honest. "Lester's Dreadful Sweaters" by K.G. Campbell is a really weird story. The illustrations are weird and retro, the characters are weird, and the outcome is weird. And I love it! The prose is sometimes overly deliberate, but it's full of amazing vocabulary, consonance, and sneaky internal rhyming. It's smart, imaginative, and witty.
Lester is an very orderly little boy. He always parts his hair perfectly and catalogs everything. One day, aged cousin Clara's cottage is eaten by a crocodile. Subsequently, she moves in to Lester's house with her knitting needles and promptly begins to ruin his life with the most hideous sweaters imaginable. Forced to wear the sweaters to school, Lester manages an ignoble end for each of them without hurting cousin Clara's feelings. "The next sweater was repulsively pumpkin, uncommonly crooked and had a
hideous hood. IT unraveled in the rain and got washed down a drain." Until the day she knits a mound of sweaters and Lester goes after them with a pair of scissors and a gleam of madness in his eyes. Clara knits the penultimate ugly sweater, and Lester has to go to a birthday party looking like a chicken. Lo and behold! The clowns at the party love Lester's sweater and offer cousin Clara a job, whisking her away to a life of adventure while Lester returns to his life of order . . . or maybe not.
If you like the unexpected and strange, or would like to build your child's vocabulary, give "Lester's Dreadful Sweaters" a read. Students grades one to three will appreciate the language and humor best.
--Andrea W., H.Q.
P.S. Check out my other favorite knitting picture book by clicking on the link below!
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