The Dirty Little Boy by Margaret Wise Brown

The boy's experiment has modern relevance, but like Brown's posthumous Love Songs of the Little Bear (reviewed above) this work is not the author's best. The brusque, imposing woman, up to her elbows in suds, recalls the old-world model of motherhood rather than its sleek contemporary counterpart. Salerno styles the mother as a curvy giant compared to her petite blond son. Elsewhere, the author sharply observes practical details, as when the bird shakes its feathers dry (''Whirrr'') and the boy tries to currycomb himself, horse-style (the iron brush ''just made white lines in the dirt on his leg''). My little boy picked this up at the library and read through the whole thing all by himself, then put it back with the words: 'I did NOT like this book, mommy' I was curious, so I leafed through it myself, and it's not all bad, however my kid did have a point. Brown's dialogue rings false, as when the child visits a pigpen (''Shoo, little pigs, take a bath so that this dirty little boy can learn how to get clean''). So she tells him to ''Run along, and see how the animals take their baths.'' The boy imitates a red bird splashing in a puddle and a yellow cat licking its paws, but each washing only leaves him dirtier then his mother chastises him for not learning from the animals how to get clean.

The title character, sticky with jam and grit, appeals to his ''big round mother'' to give him a bath, but she is ''so busy scrubbing white clothes'' in a silver-gray washtub that she has no time to rinse him.

This story, first published in Jack and Jill in 1939, feels dated now, despite a glossy treatment by Salerno (Chicken Chuck). This is the story of a very dirty little boy who tries to clean himself by imitating the bathing habits of animals.

The Dirty Little Boy by Margaret Wise Brown