SuitabookThe Café at the Edge of the Woods
Mikey Please
- Reading
- Read it aloud and pause over the rhyme, invented-feeling food ideas and illustrations. Let the child decide which details are funny or unpleasant; afterwards, revisit how the café problem was handled without assuming the ending.
- Themes
- Unusual friendship: Rene opens the café with help from Glumfoot, described as a newfound waiter and friend. The book’s stance on this remains unclear.
- Quick thinking and problem-solving: Local customers request peculiar dishes, and Glumfoot is presented as using quick thinking to save the day. Resourcefulness is part of the stated action, but its consequences and presentation across the whole story are unknown.
- Food, disgust and humour: The café provides a setting for peculiar palettes, disgusting dishes, monstrous meals and culinary curiosities. Unusual and disgusting food is treated as the book’s comic imaginative premise, although the full range of imagery is unknown.
- Worth knowing
- Some children may want preparation for the book’s ‘disgusting’ dishes and grotesque culinary imagery.