Looking for an early 1990s kid’s book about a boy getting ready to start school and not wanting to go. He gets new shoes and says they are too tight. He gets a haircut and says it makes his ears stick out. I’m fairly certain he had orange/red hair.
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
The new shoes he gets are black and white and I think each page ends with “they don’t know that I’m not going to school” or something similar to that.
This sounds so much like one of the Alexander books by Judith Viorst. Alexander does have orange hair.
I don’t know one about him not going to school, but in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, he does go shoe shopping, “So then we went to the shoestore to buy some sneakers. Anthony chose white ones with blue stripes. Nick chose red ones with white stripes. I chose blue ones with red stripes but then the shoe man said, We’re all sold out. They made me buy plain old white ones but they can’t make me wear them.”
In this book, the refrain is about going to Australia.
Is it:
I Don’t Want to Go to School by A.J. Cosmo
Joey doesn’t want to go to school and he has a whole list of far-fetched reasons to stay home. Can his mom convince him that he might enjoy school after all?
I know this isn’t it, but EVERYONE needs to know about it – Louis James Hates School, 1978, by Bill Morrison, who’s illustrated over 3 dozen books. (NOT to be confused with the much younger cartoonist who, starting in 1987 or so, wrote for The Simpsons and was a director for Futurama.)
“In Louis James Hates School the title character quits school and works briefly as a pea picker, pickle packer, and prune peeler but returns to school when he discovers that he could get better jobs if he knew how to read and write.”
I found a copy of that book a while back and it’s VERY funny in a way that’s even more absurd than the above description sounds – I won’t spoil it. Somewhat to my surprise, it was deservedly animated (it’s ten minutes long) in 1980.