Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett

 

Title: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Genre: Fantasy

Author: Judi Barrett

Illustrator: Ron Barrett

Age group: 2nd-4th

Summary

Grandpa tells the children a bed time story about a town where food falls from the sky.  The tiny town of Chewandswallow was like any other town but the had no food stores in this tiny town.  The weather happened three times a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Each meal time the people of the town would head outside with silverware and a plate or bowl so they would be ready to catch all the food the sky had to offer.  The sanitation workers of this town had to clean up any left over food or food that fell on top of houses that the people could not eat.  Then suddenly the weather began to turn violent one day of nothing but gorgonzola cheese fell and the next after that the was a fog of pea soup.  Then came a storm of bread rolls of all sizes from breadstick to giant car sized rolls.  It was like the food weather had finally broken and all natural disasters struck day after day.  a decision was made to abandoned the town so the took all the stale bread and used them as rafts to sail across the sea.  Thankfully the made it to a new land safely and were even able to use the bread as temporary housing.  The people of Chewandswallow began adjusting to new life, the biggest adjustment was that they had to go and buy food from the store now.  And then Grandpa kissed the children goodnight.  The next morning they awoke to freshly fallen snow and raced through breakfast so they could go sledding with grandpa.  The kids said that at the top of the hill looked to be a pad of butter and that the air smelled like mashed potatoes.

Evaluation

This was definitely a childhood favorite of mine growing up.  I consider myself a foodie always have been so to even think that food could come through the sky at the time was living the dream.  Now that I'm older I see a lot of sanitation issues with that and definitely would not like to live at Chewandswallow.  I think the value of this book is showing kids how to use their imagination, even after the bed time story the next morning the kids wake up and still imagine mashed potatoes and butter where their is snow.  I personally would not use this book in my classroom.