Slam!: A Tale of Consequences by Adam Stower (review)

Who knew that slamming a door could lead to such chaos? Not our protagonist, a boy who carelessly slams the door as he and his dog head out for a walk. With music blaring through his earphones and his attention on the paper he holds, he doesn’t notice that his slam has caused his ball to slide off the roof where it was stuck. That falling ball hits a cat, who bolts into a passerby, causing her to drop her groceries in the street, which leads to a traffic accident and a fish truck’s losing its contents, which eventually snowballs into a dragon coming out of the sewer, tiny aliens parachuting down on earth, and an even more massive traffic accident—as the boy remains oblivious. This lacks the cleverness and underlying control of Armstrong’s similarly themed Once upon a Banana (BCCB 12/06); some of the ensuing events seem like they’d have happened anyway sooner or later, and the similar-value pastels can make it a challenge to piece out the individual disasters. It’s still an amusing calamitous fantasia, though, with seek-and-find appeal in the ongoing trajectory of various items and critters and in surprising takes on the town both above and belowground (the sewer contains a collection of goblins and a piratical skeleton as well as some long-suffering workers). The comic sound effects and a few bits of speech-balloon dialogue are the only text, making this an easy outing for kids who prefer catastrophe to literature.