I browsed Francesco Pittau and Bernadette Gervais’s That’s Disgusting! at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend, and found myself paging through simple, funny illustrations of a little girl doing absolutely gross things, like eating lollipops covered in sand. Each two page spread has the same format: on the left, the girl is doing something gross, with a caption (“Stuffing your mouth with hair”) and on the right, in big block letters, are the words “That’s disgusting!”.
I paged through the book, laughing a little at the jokes, and then I got to “Sticking your finger in the cat’s bottom,” and realized that I was holding a gross-out masterpiece. I wasn’t wrong: as you go further along in “That’s Disgusting,” you get to installments like “hiding boogers under your chair,” “pooping in the bathtub” and “throwing up at the table.” I bought it right away.
I’ve been back for four days now, and my daughter, who’s three and a half, loves this book and demands to have it read to her at least once a day. The call-and-response structure of the story and the awesome ick factor (I can barely look at “combing your hair with the toilet brush”) makes it really good fun to read. There’s two more installments in the series: That’s Mean! and That’s Dangerous!, and I’m going to keep an eye out for them.
