7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Educators Recommend, December 7, 2003
While eating breakfast, Mary Louise realizes she has lost her manners. She begins to look for them. "She turned her pockets inside out. She shook her hair. She looked up her nose. Between her toes. Inside her shoes." No manners. So off she goes to look for them---with wagon in tow.
Thankfully, Mary Louise meets Mrs. Abby, an artist, who makes a sketch of her missing manners to help in the hunt. And what does Mary Louise's manners look like? They have "big ears for listening," says Mary Louise, "[a]nd a little mouth to keep naughty words from slipping out. The arms? Short, says Mary Louise, "for not reaching across the table."
With sketch in hand, Mary Louise visits a restaurant where the waitress recognizes the manners in the picture. But, alas, they were here---"and helped put bibs on the babies and forks on the tables"---and were gone. Mary Louise continues on her way, visiting the doctor's office, the hot-dog vendor, a street musician, the bus stop. Apparently, Mary Louise's manners had "been running around town exercising themselves."
And where does she finally find her manners? Asleep in the library, kindly covered with newspapers (because they were snoring). "Nobody's perfect, not even manners," says the librarian. Into the wagon they go. Then, happy and humming, Mary Louise heads back home with a promise never to let her manners run away again.
While reading this wonderfully wry book I found myself, along with my eighth graders to whom I was reading it, laughing out loud at Mary Louise's antics. The illustrations are deliciously funny and are a perfect match with the text.
This book would be fitting for a lesson or unit on manners for the young ones, or simply as a good old-fashioned read-aloud. Although the recommended age levels are 4-8, don't discount it for use in the middle school. On several occasions I found one of my teenaged reluctant readers in the reading corner with the book, giggling.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fun and Entertaining Book Never Loses Your Attention, December 22, 1999
This book is fun to read - full of silly sayings and crazy running about as Mary Louise loses her manners and goes off on a search to find them again. Your only danger in reading this book is that your child may think the things Mary Louise says after losing her manners are so funny, that they might want to repeat the words themselves. The illustrations are great. I didn't care for one part in the restaurant where she ties the bibs on people a little too tight. That seems less like bad manners and more like just meanness. The book will inspire some conversation between adults and children about manners - something every child needs to learn.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fun romp with a subject EVERY kid has to confront!, March 12, 1999
By A Customer
This book will elicit laughs from every child who's ever been cautioned to "mind her manners". It starts out innocuously enough, with Mary Louise saying "Pass the pancakes, POOP (instead of "please")! and proceeds from there with Mary Louise being sent to her room until she can 'find her manners." The illustrations in this book are caricatures of all the people who overwhelm Mary Louise with their talk of manners. They are funny illustrations and, together with the text of Mary Louise's dilemma of finding her manners will give something for children to identify with, as well as teach a subtle lesson of what's to be expected of good manners. There's also the statement near the end that "Nobody's perfect, not even manners", which adds a note of reality to the lesson. My only disappointment with this book is that the ending is rather anti-climatic. After Mary Louise has an artist draw a picture of what 'good manners' looks like, I was hoping to see this picture at the end of the book. Alas, however, when Mary Louise finally finds her good manners, the readers sees only a pile of papers under which they are "sleeping", so the whole concept of good manners is left abstract, even though the plot of the story built up something more. All in all, a good addition to a public library collection in a subject area on which there is very little written.
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