By Judith Viorst
His grandparents gave him a dollar last Sunday. By the next Sunday it's all gone, coin by coin, and Alexander can tell you exactly where.
Last Sunday Alexander's grandparents came to visit and gave him a dollar. A whole dollar. He was rich. He was going to save it for a walkie-talkie. Now it's the next Sunday and all he has left is bus tokens, and the book is Alexander walking you back through where it all went, one grievance at a time. Fifteen cents on bubble gum. Fifteen more on a bet with his brother Anthony that he was never going to win. A fine for saying two words his mother told him never to say. He rents a snake for an hour. There's a candy bar. There's a garage sale where he comes home with a half-melted candle, a one-eyed bear, and a deck of cards with cards missing. And the whole time he swears, he absolutely swears, that he's still saving for that walkie-talkie. Anthony still has his money. Nicholas still has his money. Alexander has tokens.
Grown-ups teach saving, which is the big obvious lesson. What nobody teaches is that money leaks: a dollar can vanish in fifteen-cent pieces, and not one of those small buys ever feels like a real decision. That's the whole thing this book is about. Viorst never sits Alexander down for a talk. She just lets him list what he spent, and the list does the work. A child reading along may watch the walkie-talkie drift further out of reach with every page, while Alexander keeps swearing he's saving for it. The gap between what he says and what he's doing is where the joke lives, and it's the lesson too. Cruz's scratchy black-and-white drawings keep Alexander looking permanently outraged, which suits him.