Book Review: A Perfectly Messed Up Story

Review: ★★★ (3/5)

Patrick McDonnell’s 2014 picture book A Perfectly Messed Up Story is a delightfully engaging and humorous story, offering ample opportunity for play and relationship-building between reader and child. The protagonist, Louie, is frustrated when things are not going perfectly, but the book breaks the 4th wall and brings the readers in to help Louie realize that life is perfectly imperfect and messy.

While there are moments for empathy and social-emotional learning, it should be noted that a lot of the humor in this story comes at Louie’s expense, thus counteracting the nourishing and empathy-driven moments from earlier in the story. In the end, the readers’ actions (messing up the book despite Louie’s cries for order) do help him let go of his need for control, but it might not be the best example of how to do so because it fails to respect the “no.” Therefore, this book could be read as a failure to teach the foundations of consent and the importance of respecting people’s boundaries. This faux pas could likely be counteracted with meaningful conversation and a reminder that should someone say “no” in real life, we need to respect that and consider alternative ways of getting our point across.

In the end, the play and engagement of McDonnell’s story are enough to outweigh the potential misinterpretation, and, with strong adult engagement in the relational aspect of the book, it holds the potential to be incredibly valuable.