The Very Stubborn Centipede Is a Very Abhorrent Book

A couple years ago, my family hosted a German exchange student. Early in her stay, she hurried downstairs to report that there was "a little animal" in her room. Not one of our three cats, and certainly not our boisterous dog. No, this was a something much tinier and much stranger, more foreign to her than the country in which she was living for a year. Mom ran upstairs to investigate, her face clouded by visions of mice or rats or never-before-seen greenish-purple alien creatures. Alas, the source of her distress wasn't nearly as interesting as all that. The culprit was a multi-legged arthropod known to scuttle across the linoleum in our kitchen with some frequency, much to the excitement of our cats. It was a centipede.

Given my familiarity with the slightly startling creatures, I couldn't resist picking up The Very Stubborn Centipede (the title in homage, I presume, to Eric Carle, master storyteller regarding all things tiny and multi-legged) when I spotted it on a recent trip to the library. The cover features a very ornery-looking centipede apparently falling to the ground; a very similar illustration graces page 21 of this book, but the pictures are not identical.

The story revolves around a woman - the narrator - who is distressed when a centipede clamps onto her toe while she is standing barefoot in her kitchen. Evidently he grabs on with feet, not fangs; she seems not to sustain any physical damage from the encounter, though the emotional toll is severe, and she flails her foot around wildly in order to make him relinquish his hold, which he eventually does before being finished off by a combination of the broom and the cat (though the words and the pictures seem to disagree on this; the narrator implies the death of the centipede, while a two-page spread shows the cat depositing him outside with the aid of a very humanoid paw).

I found this book, which was published in 2005, very disappointing. It is written in stilted, uninspiring verse that is plagued by a pet peeve of mine - randomly sticking commas at the end of a line of poetry. Susan Snyder's rhymes are unusually weak. For example: "I jumped from one foot, / To the other... / As he crawled from one toe, / To another!" and "But at long last, / He tired out... / As I shook my foot hard, / He went flying about!" In addition to the commas, she seems overly fond of exclamation points and ellipses, and she's not very diligent about keeping up a consistent rhythm, particularly in this instance: "With all those legs, / He hit top speed! / (It was a race between me, / my broom... / And that centipede!)" I'm also unsure as to why she stuck the last half of that stanza in parentheses.

Beyond my many issues with the technical aspects of the writing, it just isn't a very interesting story. A centipede attaches to her foot, she dislodges it, the cat disposes of it. Whoopee. It all happens very quickly, over the course of twelve two-page spreads; unlike in Robert Quackenbush's Henry's Awful Mistake, in which a hapless duck deals with the escalating problems caused by his stand-off with an ant intruder, I never became invested in the action or the characters.

The illustrations didn't help. As I read through the book the first time, they struck me as unsophisticated. When I read the back of the book, I saw that illustrator Anna Johanson was only 13 years old when this book was published, and I was impressed. But when I looked through the pages again, I remained unmoved. Yeah, they're decent for a 13-year-old; if they'd been the illustrations for a class project I'm sure she would have gotten an A. And I do think the pictures are better than the verse; the centipede is engagingly devious-looking, if not quite anatomically correct (the number of legs seems to change considerably from page to page) and the cat has a rather endearing heroic swagger. But the woman does not come across nearly as well as her smaller co-stars, always looking hokey and out of place.

I just finished reading Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird, in which she warned of the urge to mutter dark curses against certain undeserving authors whose works you might happen to come across. I feel that vile desire rising up within me now as I rest dourly in the certainty that I could write a better book than this and that when he was thirteen, my brother Nathan could have furnished more effective illustrations. I may sit and simmer in these poison juices for a while. But then I shall release them into the snowy outdoors, for they are as ugly as a creepy-crawly centipede. And I won't even ask my cat to do the dirty work for me.