Elspeth Lorraine

Book Reviews

December 16, 2022

"The Sour Grape" By Jory John and Illustrated by Pete Oswald

Have you read The Bad Seed? No? Then get out of here. Go to the library, check it out or buy it and try harder in life. Or else I’ll never forgive you! Just kidding. I’m not like “The Sour Grape”, the 6th book in the “Food Group” series by Jory John and Pete Oswald. My love of this series all started with The Bad Seed and The Sour Grape is another winner! 

 

The Sour Grape holds grudges for every little thing. Lime didn’t return his scarf? Grudge! Cat moves HIS chair? Grudge! One day a series of mishaps prevent The Sour Grape from making a bench sitting appointment on time with Lenny the lemon. And what does Lenny do? He holds a grudge! Hey wait! The Sour Grape has a good reason why he was late! But Lenny is too busy holding a grudge to care. Could it be that The Sour Grape's friends are doing their best too and holding grudges means holding on to bad energy? Should The Sour Grape choose kindness and understanding? I don’t think I need to tell you the end.

Bits and Pieces: The artist used scanned watercolor textures and digital paint to create the illustrations in this book. The Bad Seed is my first true love, but The Sour Grape is a great accompaniment. Don’t hold a grudge against me if you haven’t read it yet!

Not Sure About: Is it weird this book made me thirsty? I really wanted some juice after I read it. 

Favorite Part: The grandparents were RAISINS. Raisins, ya’ll. I laughed about this and called my friend Jana and told her immediately and she laughed too and hopefully she wasn’t pretending but she might have been because she is a new mother and I can be quite needy and there’s no telling if she even has the capacity to listen to me talk about raisins or grapes or whatever else I chose to blather on about or run on about like this sentence. This makes me think about this step grandma I had, (for like two seconds. Cue eye roll.) and when I was forced to speak with her I just put the phone down and wandered off the play Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. Is this what Jana is doing to me?! Oh great. Now I’M mad.

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