Our friends at MyLittleBigTown kindly sent us copies of some of their latest books and amongst them was one of their new range of 'Tiny Twisted Tales', bite-sized books with rhyming text and illustrations by one of the busiest guys in the business, Calvin Innes.
Calvin is tightly involved with most of MyLittleBigTown's output, mostly as an illustrator but in this case he's wrestled with words and rhymes to bring you a twisted tale of a man who really loves eating insects.
Entomophagic Stuart the Bug Eating Man isn't well read, he's not vastly knowledgeable but he really does like to chow down on centipedes, scoff spiders and slurp slug juice.
Poor Stuart's wife despairs of him and urges him to go out and get a proper job. With a flash of inspiration, Stuart hits on a brilliant idea - to merge his career with his love of troughing on creepy crawlies. From then on Stuart becomes...the Bug Eating Guy!
I was quite surprised that Charlotte loved this book as much as she did. It's the sort of thing I could imagine young boys finding endlessly fascinating but my little girl, though blessed with an innate knowledge of Disney princesses and fairy tales, does seem to like icky gross stories too.
It really reminded me of the fantastic Edward Gorey stories though it's not quite as dark and gothic as those. We look forward to seeing the other tiny twisted tales arriving soon from MyLittleBigTown.
Charlotte's best bit: Stuart's super-cool bug-shaped bling!
Daddy's favourite bit: Gross liquidized slug shakes! Yum!
(Book kindly supplied for review by MyLittleBigTown)