A young worm discovers, day by day, that there are some very good and some not so good things about being a worm in this great big world.

Genre: Modern Fantasy

This is modern fantasy because earthworms are not actually living human lives beneath the Earth. They do not actually have homework, or baseball caps, or tell jokes, or fellowship with spiders. While they do take care of the Earth and eat the soil and make it a healthier place, and yes sometimes earthworms go on top of sidewalks and bask in the sunshine, the earthworm in real life would not tell his or her own story in a book and live out the same things that humans would. A diary would also not be kept as an earthworm.
Personification is the element of style used throughout the whole book. The earthworm as the main character is given human characteristics, starting with the appearance of a human, with a baseball hat, two eyes like human eyes, and a human like face. The earthworm goes to school like a human would, and he has a family similar to suburban America, with the newspaper reading dad, and the mom that has long eyelashes, and the grandparent that lives with them in their home. Each character in the book is given human characteristics, even the spider and the ants. Earthworms do not have these types of human family structures. They do not have human teachers that tell them not to eat their homework, and what is more, unlike humans they cannot speak English or even write, therefore they do not even have homework at all! The book is full of elements where the earthworm “child” is doing many things and living the life of a typical American or human child, such as going to a dance with a disco ball and doing the hokey pokey!
The main character is the earthworm, and he is not given a name, but we know he is a young earthworm because of the family structure that he has. He keeps a diary of his daily happenings and surroundings so that we can follow him all around and see how he lives. We meet his friends and actually the foil characters as well through him, which would be the bird that wants to eat him and the children that almost step on him and that scream at the sight of him. The earthworm does not change as a character, he is simply retelling his life story, and so I am going to call him a flat character.

This book was short but good! ( )

This book can be used when teaching a lesson on bugs. It shows the duties of all the different bugs and the life of a worm. I would use this book in Kindergarten and first grade classes.

Review—

Genre- Fantasy. During this story the reader gets a peek into the life of a worm. What school is like for then, what kind of friends they have, and what happens when a worms eats their homework. This family of worms has taken on human characteristics that can not realistically happen because worms do not go to school or eat their homework.

Age Appropriateness- Lower Primary ( )