Don’t Look At It! Don’t Touch It! by Steve Patschke

Available on Amazon

Don’t Look At It! Don’t Touch It! is perhaps the most fun book I’ve read in a quite some time. It’s full of suspense, and silly giggles, and play-acting, and all sorts of fun. My kids and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The premise is simple. Four friends find a strange black box with strange, cryptic warnings on it – “Don’t Look At It, Don’t Touch It, Don’t Open It!”. Of course, their curiosity insists they must look at it, must touch it, must open it, whereupon they discover a mysterious item and more cryptic warnings. This happens over and over again (there’s that repetition that small kids love) until at the last….

No, I’m not going to tell you the ending. Suffice it to say that it’s a happy one, suitable for children.

This is a great book for giving kids a bit of experience with suspense. It could be a bit spooky — in fact, my daughter got surprised by just how spooky. She’d had great fun with the book when mama read it, so she settled down to read it again herself just before bed. Without mama there to make it fun, she got a little freaked out and ended up having a hard time getting to sleep that night. Lesson learned – this is a book best read in the daylight.

So have fun with reading it out loud. Do your best creepy-scary voice, and make it comical. Show your kids that it’s fun sometimes to get just a little scared, because that makes the “boo!” all the more exciting.

Don’t Look At It! Don’t Touch It! by Steve Patschke, illustrated by Julie Durrell. Troll Communications, 1999.