"Why?"
Morning noon and night, she asks why. Her dad tries to answer each time she asks, but after a while it just drives him bonkers.
Then one day while they are playing in the sandbox, the horrible Thargons land...they say they are going to destroy the planet Earth. All the adults quake in fear. All the kids and kitties quake in fear...but Lily asks:
"Why?"
The dread leader of the Thargons answers...and Lily asks:
"Why?'
Big people you can probably take this to the logical conclusion. Little people are probably giggling and wondering what happens next. Go find this at your local library. If you're an adult with a child of a certain age, you will laugh in sympathy. If you're a kid, you'll just laugh. Tony Ross's pictures ALWAYS make me smile (here and elsewhere). Here they are scribbly bright expressive and a little inspired by graphic novels (before that was all cool and stuff). Lindsay Camp should have never stopped writing for children...and more of his books should have jumped the pond...sadly he only writes big people nonfiction and websites now...weep...
I wrote a review of this thirteen years ago on Amazon, and I still love it. I read it to a generation of first graders in Massachusetts and then the following year in Ohio during school visits...and on more than one occasion, a young patron came up to me in the library and pulled at my pantleg and smiled and said:
"Why?"