toys

Book Review: Salmonella (by some author whose name I can’t be bothered to look up because his book is that dumb)

Last week, Simon and I went out looking for toys. Big kid toys, like trucks, trains, puzzles, and balls. Evidently, by nine months of age (i.e. in 2.5 months, so we need to start practicing), he’s supposed to be able to look for a ball that has rolled out of sight. And we don’t have any balls. (Beeman, this is not an invitation to make an insult, just saying.)

We went to several resale shops (because I refuse to pay full price for toys) none of which had toys to our liking, but one of them had books. I ended up buying three, two of which are great, and the other one was Salmonella.

Now let me explain how we ended up buying this stupid book. Simon was cranky. I was holding him rather than carrying him in the Bjorn. It had started out cold and rainy that day and had turned warm and muggy and we were both wearing far too many clothes. And Simon was, as I mentioned, tired, wiggly, and sad — so sad that when we got ready to check out, everyone let us go to the front of the line. It wasn’t the time to linger over purchases.

And judging this book by its cover, it looked kind of clever. Salmonella — like Cinderella, but with microbes. I flipped it open and glanced at a random page. There was a phrase about Salmonella the protagonist scrubbing the floor where something germy (that might contain actual salmonella), I don’t remember what, had accumulated. Seemed clever enough.

It’s not clever. It was just that page that seemed clever, and that was probably by accident.

Essentially, the author took the story of Cinderella, changed a few key plot points to shorten the story enough so that toddlers would sit through it (and to avoid copyright infringement?), and changed the names of the characters to microbes.

Here are my main complaints:

1. The art contains too much clip art as background images and is not interesting to look at.
2. There is nothing about the microbes except for their names that would suggest that they’re microbes. They are all shaped like people — no flagellae or pseudopodia to speak of. Salmonella, the protagonist, is smaller than the prince, Prince Polio, which is, of course, inaccurate. The microbes don’t do anything consistent with their nature. Salmonella doesn’t infect anyone. The royal messenger, one E. Coli, isn’t sitting on a pile of human waste. It’s not that hard to find out information about germs and weave it into your story. I am a chemistry teacher with typing skills and access to Google, and I can figure it out. Seriously. (I mean, I could take the story of Cinderella and change all the names to names of birds and call it L. atricilla, but if the characters don’t fly, don’t have beaks, don’t eat insects or scavenge, is it worth it to have gone to the trouble of looking up about six bird names and contacting a publisher? I would submit that it is not.)
3. The microbe names are unimaginitive. The queen is “Catherine Cold.” I’m sorry, but “cold” isn’t the name of the germ — at least say Rhinovirus and teach toddlers some Greek roots.
4. Personally (and perhaps reasonable people can differ on this, maybe maybe?), I find the story of Cinderella really condescending toward women, as though all they are hoping for in life is to magically find Prince Charming, which will happen in a moment of love at first sight and be sealed with a magical dance/kiss/moment. Little/teenage girls on some level internalize and believe that drivel, which does them no favors as they learn to navigate Real Life on Their Own. Furthermore, little boys don’t need to read books like this that make them think this is all girls want in life or that they will know which girl to marry by how well she dances (as is the case in Salmonella).
5. Lastly (most importantly?) microbes reproduce asexually and don’t need to mate. Furthermore, Salmonella (a bacterium) and Poliovirus (a virus) cannot, even if they wanted to, mate. This is a well established fact, and I feel it was overlooked by someone’s editor, who may or may not have thought he would “ever use biology in [his] line of work.”

In conclusion, Salmonella is a poorly conceived and lamentably executed piece of “children’s literature,” written and illustrated by a lazy person who may be mysogynistic and has no science background or interest in plot or in using the internet to do a modicum of research.

Toy update: we now have balls. One is filled with orange swirly glitter that moves, and one is that mesh soccer ball that everyone has because babies can grab it and throw it across the room. Yes, we paid full price for them, and no, he does not look for them when he chucks them away.