#702 of 1001 · July 3, 2022

When you were young, did your parents respond to conflict by issuing threats? Assuming the threats were effective, did you look back later in life and realize your parents would have been unlikely to carry them out? Readers can witness the fallout from one child’s decision to call his father’s bluff in Jules Feiffer’s By the Side of the Road. The story begins in that pressure cooker of sibling tension: the back seat of the family car. Richard and his younger brother Rudy pass the time by getting into physical fights, headless of their parents’ reprimands. After one too many squabbles, their father declares that he will pull the car over and leave anyone still fighting to stand and wait until the car returns. Richard, undaunted, accepts and steps out onto the shoulder of the highway. Since neither he nor his father is willing to apologize, he stays there—for days, weeks, months, years. He makes friends, builds a house, digs a series of underground tunnels, gets married, starts a family…and eventually reconciles with his parents. Feiffer takes a clever premise and exaggerates it to ridiculous proportions, with a charming first-person narrative and expressive, loose-lined black and white art. #side #road #car #brother #father #mother #highway #underground #family #book #books #childrensbooks #picturebook #picturebooks #picturebookillustration #picturebookart #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks