The Un-Wedding

By Babette Cole

This controversial children's picture book has an interesting take on divorce. By the first sentence, I could tell that this author has a good sense of humor, as the family's last name is Ogglebutt. I enjoyed the second page and third page that was a diagram of the huge mansion the family lived in and had captions of what each parent hated about the other. It then had pictures of what each parent thought of as fun--which were complete opposites. I thought it was very interesting how the author then has a 4 progressing pictures of how the mother and father went from loving eachother and looking beautiful to how they grew to hate eachother and look "uglier and uglier". The two parents looked older, meaner, and each had much longer noses. It made me wonder why she chose to make their noses longer to symbolize the oppositive of beauty. After a slew of practical pranks that the parents play on eachother, the children start to take an active role in helping their parents become happy again. After talking it through with their peers, they decide to go talk to a minister about un-marrying their parents. After that point, it seemed like everyone was happy. I thought it was interesting that the illustrator used black for everything that was included in the 'un-wedding'. It was almost as if they were holding a funeral for the death of their parent's marriage yet it was a very happy time for everyone. Overall I felt that this book had a humorous take on divorce and I think it would be great to include in my classroom library because so many children have divorced parents.