By Ryan T. Higgins
Penelope Rex wants friends on her first day of school. But her classmates are children, and to a young T. rex children are delicious, so she eats them — and then nobody will sit with her.
Penelope Rex has picked out her backpack and she's ready. Then she walks in and finds her whole class is human children, and human children taste wonderful, so she eats them. The teacher makes her spit them out. She does it again. She does it a third time. Before long there's a T. rex sitting alone at lunch while twenty cross, slightly damp children keep their distance, and Penelope can't figure out why nobody likes her. Her dad tries to explain it at home. The thing that actually gets through is Walter, the class goldfish, who bites her finger hard — and Penelope finds out from the inside exactly what she's been doing.
Most first-day books ask your child to be the nervous one. This one lets them be the sensible one instead, laughing at a dinosaur who's getting it spectacularly wrong. That's a real relief when your own child's stomach is in knots. And nobody stops to preach: Penelope doesn't understand until the goldfish bites her, and for a lot of children that rings true, because being told a thing and feeling it are not the same. The joke is silly enough for a four-year-old and dry enough for an eight-year-old, so it can hold a mixed room at bedtime.