This book always made me a bit queasy.

I read the book “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”. It was a book about food falling from the sky, written by Judi Barrett. I didn't like the drawings very much, they were done by Ron Barrett. I thought they were too boring for a kids book. This book was about a town named Chewandswallow. In this book food fell from the sky for each meal. It would mashed potatoes, wind would blow in hamburgers, rain soda, and the clouds were made of eggs. The weather ended up getting really bad. A giant pancake fell on the school and it rained cheese for a whole day. The people ended up having to move away. They built sandwich boats and found a new place to live.

The main character would have to be the grandfather, who told the story about the town of Chewandswallow to his grandchildren. During the story there wasn't people talking, it just told about what happened there.

The story took place in the grandfather’s home in 1978, when the book was written. It also took place in Chewandswallow. There wasn't a set time because it was all made up.

The author’s message would be that good things can go bad. The book started off good when everything was normal for the people. Food wouldn't be messed up and it came at the right times. Then one day everything went wrong and there was salt and pepper wind, over sized bread, and tomato tornadoes.

I would recommend this book to children. I thought the pages looked boring though, so young children may lose interest. Older people could also like it because it is a very interesting story.

I am back in the states for the summer, which means I have access to a library of physical books again, which in turn means I can start up my project of reading one picture book a day again!

I'm so excited, I haven't been able to do it for a long time.

I decided to start out this epic summer journey with my best friend's favorite picture book. I've never read it, she loves it, and talks about it fairly frequently, so I finally read it today. I'm sad to say, that I think she loves it because of nostalgia, because I thought it was fairly meh. Well, not completely true, I thought it was quite imaginative, and that the vocabulary used was fairly advanced, and as such would be good for kids, but I didn't really like it. It felt unfinished to me. Why was all the food getting bigger and bigger? Why didn't the bread just melt in the ocean? It doesn't matter how stale bread gets, it's going to evaporate in water.

I guess I read this when I was too old and so couldn't suspend my disbelief. Sad days.

Story: Imaginative
Art: Meh
Price: $16.95

That seems excessive, especially because the art basically looks like wood prints.

This is my favorite picture book. Even as a teenager, I'd hunt his book up from time to time to make sure I'd memorized all the lines correctly.

This story reads exactly like all stories told by your grandfather are supposed to. The ones where, as a kid, you keep saying 'really!', then try to verify everything via grandma, who then yells at grandpa for filling your head with nonsense.

"Meatballs weren't even mentioned. What a bad title"

One night, after a pancake flies off the stove top and onto Henry’s hair, a grandfather tells his two grandchildren the tall tale of the tiny town of Chewandswallow. Chewandswallow had everything most small towns have, stores, houses, a school, people, dogs, cats, but what it didn’t have were food stores because they weren’t needed. Instead of buying it off the shelf, food arrived three times a day by weather. The townspeople took their plates and cups everywhere so they would be ready if it rained orange juice and eggs for breakfast or frankfurters in rolls followed by a drizzle of soda for dinner. All was well in Chewandswallow until the weather started getting worse. The food tasted horrible and became dangerous. The school got buried under a giant pancake and people got lost in the thickest pea soup fog in history. What are the townspeople to do?

The Barretts (a husband and wife team) have created a fantastical world that never ceases to intrigue readers. I used to dream about eating strawberries as big as apples, so Chewandswallow seemed like a paradise to me! The humorous text is great for a read aloud and is set off nicely in solid colored text boxes. It addresses the questions that kids would have about living in such a town. What would you do if you got hungry between meals? And what happens to all the leftovers on the streets? The illustrations are often broken up into comic strip-like panels and use intricate line work and hatching to create a cartoonishly whimsical world. The book begins in black and white, but when Grandpa begins telling the kids about Chewandswallow color begins to glide over the pages like butter melting on a skillet.

Full Review at Picture-Book-a-Day: http://picturebookaday.blogspot.com/2...

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" by Judi Barrett was a good children's story with an original idea. I wasn't that in love with the illustrations in this book, but I believe that this was an interesting story for children because of its creativity. My actual rating is 2.5/5 stars.

I love this book. I throughly enjoyed reading this book. This version is for a younger audience than they version I read in middle school. It is also slightly different on how things happen than in the movies. This book is so fun and so creative. Every child I know has seen these movies and read these books because who doesn't want a pancake to fall out of the sky. I love how the illustrations in the beginning are just in black-and-white and then when the grandfather begins to tell the story of the town chewandswallow color is added to the pages. The story of the town chewandswallow shows kids that the possibility of life are endless. There is no reason to limit yourself because anything is possible. Children already have a lot of restrictions put on them but this book allows creativity to flow and the possibility of work could follow the sky is endless. This could be a fun book to read as kind of a brain break. Something that is fun and humorous.

Cute book. Starts with grandpa cooking pancakes and ends up with one on grandsons head. Grandpa comes up with a wild story. My daughter had to read this for school

One of my kids' all-time favorites. By far and away the Barrett's best book. Ron Barrett's wonderful illustrations remind me of the work of Canadian humorist Bruce McCall - both are masters of
treating bizarre subject matter with a perfectly straight face. One for the read-over-and-over shelf.

I thought the book "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" was a good book. This book starts out as a story that is being read to this man’s grandchildren. The story is about a little town called Chewandswallow. This town isn't like any normal town, in Chewandswallow people don't have to buy food they get their food from the sky. Every day during breakfast, lunch and dinner food falls from the sky and people go out and gather it. After a while the food got bigger and the food storms became more dangerous and everyone had to leave the little town.

This book is told in first-person. The story about the town Chewandswallow is told by the grandfather. The grandfather who is telling this so believed fictional story is also a man who lives in the town of Chewandswallow.

The setting of this book is a story from the past but told in the future. The first part of the story takes place in the home of the grandfather and then moves to the fictional town called Chewandswallow.

I believe the theme of this book is about the weather and how people have an effect on it. It shows younger children how the weather can change at an instant. It can be server like the tomato tornado in the book or something as simple a milk rain.

I recommend this book to younger children because it’s easy to understand but yet it shows them how the weather can change at an instant.

Same intro for book number four.

This Christmas the boys - my two grandsons - are finally 'too old' to be read to, but I am not too old to read to me! (Told them so!) And because of that, I'm re-reading some of our favorites from over the years. These are books I keep at my house - not theirs - and they won't get them until they (maybe) have children to read them to. This the fourth I am reviewing this Christmas, 2022...

Crazy book. Absolutely wild and unpredictable. What's to say when you mix weather with the food?

After Grandpa finishes making breakfast for the family - pancakes, which are incidentally, one of my favorites - he tells the children a story about a land far away where three times a day it rains food. All kinds of food: toast and jelly at breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, even lamb chops for supper. (This is decidedly NOT a vegan book.) Every day it's something different, but then something not-so-good happens...

Food starts coming in torrents. Too much food. Weird combinations of food: brussel sprouts with peanut butter and mayonnaise; pea soup which creates a fog around town; so much spaghetti it snarls the traffic in town and so on...

What to do? Read the book to find out, but it's a fun book, with delightful artwork - pencil sketch-type art punctuated with pops of color. Another 'children's book' which is as lovely too look at as it's fun to read.

Five stars