SADIE MOUSE WRECKS THE HOUSE

Fed up with being good, a young rodent turns troublemaker.

Sadie Mouse doesn’t think it’s fair that her brother, Reggie, gets away with shirking his chores and even making more messes for her to clean up. So after Mom hands the siblings a list of jobs before leaving for the day, Sadie puts a literal, Amelia Bedelia–esque spin on all their duties. Tasked with taking out the garbage, she flings it out a window (“Garbage doesn’t get more out than that!”), and she makes the bed…into an ice cream sundae. Sadie glories in being naughty. Exhausted, she falls asleep, but when her mother returns, she’s thrilled to see a clean house—turns out Reggie’s decided to embrace his more responsible side. Most of the text is conveyed through dialogue presented in speech bubbles and featuring clever puns and wordplay (“You don’t have a bad bone in your whole body.” “Just watch. I’ve got a whole bad skeleton”). Miller’s energetic, thick-lined cartoons brim with humor as Sadie turns the house upside down—a slice of pizza hangs from a clothesline; toilet paper litters the lawn. Though Reggie learns his lesson, the book never veers on preachy as it comes to a satisfying conclusion.

A funny and messy how-to for doing chores the wrong way.