Help Wanted Must Love Books (2020) is a good solid picture book written by Janet Sumner Johnson and illustrated by Courtney Dawson. It has a fine premise that both engages readers by itself and sets up a good plot structure. Shailey loves it when her father reads her stories at bedtime…until he changes jobs. He’s distracted and exhausted by his new job, so much so that he neglects his bedtime duties. So Shailey fires him.
She puts up a notice looking for a new “bedtime storyteller,” and immediately people show up to interview. But these people, though not named as such in the story, are easily recognized as characters from well-known stories: the three little pigs, Snow White and the seven dwarfs, the gingerbread man, a rhyming giant, Goldilocks, Cinderella, and Captain Hook.
Most seem promising. All fall short in some way. Cinderella, for example, leaves sooty fingerprints on the books she reads. Shailey fires each storyteller after each fails, and, in a nice touch, edits the job notice to try to avoid the most recent problems in the next candidate. Eventually, one last person applies, and does a good job. (It’s her dad in a fantasy/fairy tale costume.) She rehires him, with the requirement that his work stuff is off limits during story time.
Once the problem is resolved, the book shares two pages with job application materials from four applicants (so we get to read, for example, Tinkerbell’s personal statement). Nice quiet fun there.
Kids who like stories will like this, and this is a good springboard book, giving parents an excuse to explore the stories kids don’t know yet.
The illustrations are colorful, but on the simple side, with figures floating on white pages without background. On the story level, I was also curious about two things: how these characters saw the job listing, and why Shailey’s dad didn’t seem to notice the parade of story characters coming through his home.
