Picture books about politeness don’t always please TiME to SAY
“PLEASE”! By Mo Willems. Hyperion, 40 pp., $15.99. Ages: See
discussion below. By Janice Harayda Why are so many children’s
books about manners so rude? With a wedding on my calendar this
weekend, I looked into several high-profile entries in the
field. And I can’t recommend any of the books wholeheartedly
except for the gifted Diane Goode’s Mind Your Manners!, which I
reviewed a while back. John Bemelmans Marciano trades on the
fame of his grandfather’s Madeline in Madeline Says Merci
(Viking, 2001), but he falls far short of the quality of the
original in this book of derivative art and painfully strained
poetry about being polite. Whoopi Goldberg’s Whoopi’s Big Book
of Manners (Hyperion, 2006) has garish pictures by Alexander
“Olo” Sroczynski and a muddled text. (Each page describes a
breach of manners that’s worse than the one that preceded it —
not a bad concept, except that the book says, for example, that
speaking with food in your mouth is