Drew Daywalt’s newest picture book, The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors is inspired by a game that children play all over the world. It takes an amusing look at three ‘warriors’, Rock, Paper and Scissors, as they search for an adversary who can match them and maybe even beat them in battle!
The Story: Rock, Paper and Scissors prove their strength by fighting various household and garden objects. All are frustrated by their inability to find an equal challenger until one day they find themselves together in the garage. Battle commences and each of them is delighted to find that they have an adversary that can beat them.
The characters fight their individual battles in the garden, Mum’s office and the kitchen before they come together in the garage. Their previous opponents include an apricot, a clothes peg and, our favourite, frozen dinosaurs! There is fast paced action, fighting talk and lots of humour as each character strives to achieve their goal. But despite their battles the story also leads the three characters to find happiness and a long lasting friendship.
There are so many things that we love about this book. We love the names used to describe the locations of the characters (Pit of Office Rubbish Bin, the tiny village of Junk Drawer) and we laugh at the descriptions of everyday household objects (sticky circle man, giant’s underwear). We love the fighting talk between the characters and their opponents and Adam Rex’s comic style illustrations are brilliant, we particularly like Paper’s legs and we love the illustration showing the frozen dinosaurs advancing towards Scissors. The characters’ dialogue is shown in speech bubbles and it moves the story along at a fast pace, it’s also the kind of dialogue that can be read in different voices – our Rock’s voice is deep and booming in comparison to Scissors’ very feminine and snooty style of speech.
In Germany Rock, Paper, Scissors is called Schere, Stein, Papier, we’d love to know what it’s called in other languages too! Please tell us in the comments if you know it by another name.
Age Range: 5 +
Author: Drew Daywalt / Illustrator: Adam Rex
Thank you so much to publisher Harper Collins for sending us a copy of The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors which we think is brilliant. The book’s trailer introduces the three intrepid heroes and will give you more of a flavour of the story.
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