Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar Review

Overall Rating

I read this book after a colleague of mine spent an entire lunch detailing the depths of feeling he experienced when reading it. After work I went straight to the Waterstones bookshop in Bluewater. This is a very large bookstore and can be found approximately 112 yards north of Marks&Spencer. I located and purchased a special edition 3D fold out copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the princely sum of £7.99. I felt this was a very good buy for an Eric Carle book, and especially as my good friend had praised it so earlier. I was really looking forward to the subtle references to Marxism and the metaphorical battle fought in the head of the caterpillar, bringing together confused family relationships and the stretches of family ties caused by commuting, in turn caused by rising house prices in London. I was therefore obviously dismayed and unsettled when I opened up the book to find the writing style of a standard I am not familiar with. Unprepared to be defeated by the superior understanding of profound life values of the author, I read the book several times through to further condition myself to the conceptual imagery of the author, alas, to no avail. So I sent a telegram to my longstanding friend Professor Edward Nox-Fenterton. I felt that if anyone could help me read and benefit from this book it would be this guy, because he has been the head English Literature Lecturer(HELL) at the university of Cambridge for the last 16 years.
Anyway, he told me that The very hungry caterpillar was indeed an interesting read and my colleague was correct in his understanding of the references to Marxism and the over development of our capital city.
What he did say also was that in writing said book, the author Eric Carle had deliberately opened up a Pandora's box of literature. Apparently, Carle had just been scammed with some technical details by Penguin publishing and the rest of the publishing industry thought it was his own fault. Anyway, as intelligent and ingenious as Carle was, he was also quite eccentric and short tempered. One thing led to another and he decided payback was needed.
Now, every 3 years every name in the publishing industry turns up to a very posh ball in an exotic location around the world. This event is known as the Tri Annual Publishing Exotic Event or TAPEE as it is known in everyday language. This years event was hosted by Scholastic and it was in New Zealand, specifically Auckland. It was supposed to be just another party but one Eric Carle had different ideas. To put what happened next as the world's press put it, 'crazed, failure driven author runs amok with industrial strength laxative'
Basically he put four litres of cow laxative in the punch and, to this day (9 years later), each attendee of the party can still only eat stale bread with a thin layer of spread of any sort.
The resolve of the publishing industry is cast of iron though and the committee of non fiction paper publishers (CNFPP) decided to reformat the party event but continue with it nonetheless. Now, they have dropped the 'exotic' portion of the title, swapped the letters around and now call the event PATE.
To revert back to my review now and the subject of the herewith stated article, I shall tell you what happened next to poor old dejected Eric Carle. In fact I don't think I will because you obviously won't print this because I am not actually reviewing everything but talking rubbish.

ps - I don't really expect you to actually take this seriously obviously but I am just continuing writing because I am bored and it is your job to read it - HAHAHAHAHAHA
pps please please don't ban me from this website.

Members' Comments onrds1's Review

• Peter on 1st Mar 2007

  rds1, how long did it take you to write this? Reviews like yours (every now and again) help make review moderation a more fun and interesting task.

• Helen of Troy on 1st Mar 2007

  Ha Ha! rds1, how could they possibly ban you after writing your review with such thought and passion?!!!!
  Very entertaining! Well done!

• rds1 on 1st Mar 2007

  Thanks a lot. I had a whole afternoon with nothing to do!

• Lee2008 on 3rd Mar 2007

  Great review. You should review Spot the dog next or Meg and Mog.
  I love caterpillars, I had a pet caterpillar called Glenn, he got eaten by a Butterfly.