NO! I Won’t Go To School

Zombies, monsters, and dragons stalk this book’s pages. Cries of despair echo through them. Prisons and dungeons lie in wait. Is this a nightmare? Is it an apocalypse? Well, yes—because it’s the day before our narrator’s first day of school, and all entreaties to his mother are falling on deaf ears. Why should he go to school when he already knows two letters, “N” and “O,” and he knows they spell NO!, which is exactly the word this occasion demands? Why aren’t these magic letters working anymore? Alonso Núñez’s playful story, Dave Morrison’s rollicking Spanish-to-English translation, and Bruna Assis Brasil’s imaginative illustrations offer a doomsday vision of a child’s first day of school that any young reader will recognize.