The Big Bang and Other Farts: A Blast Through the Past

by Daisy Bird, Marianna Coppo (Illustrator)

Overview

For fans of No One Likes a Fart, a hilariously fresh take on gas! A serious documentary turns into a very silly exploration of why important historical events happened the way they did . . . and the answer is always a fart!

One day, Daddy Rat sits his baby rats down to watch a very serious documentary about some of the most important moments in history. Sounds boring, right? However, the babies are delighted and surprised when the documentary shows that the reason for life in the universe isn't the Big Bang but . . . the Big Fart!
 
It turns out, every single major historical event was caused by, you guessed it — a fart! The extinction of the dinosaurs, the end of the Ice Age . . . even the secret behind the Mona Lisa's smile can all be traced to the passing of gas. For Daddy Rat, these smelly revelations are simply too much. But for the baby rats (and for young readers everywhere), this is the best show ever!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780735268029
Publisher:	Tundra
Publication date:	08/22/2023
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	48
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

DAISY BIRD is the pseudonym for Jacky Colliss Harvey, the New York Times bestselling author of Red: A History of the Redhead, My Life As A Redhead: A Journal, The Animal's Companion and Walking Pepys's London. She studied English at Cambridge University and art history at the Courtauld Institute. She has worked in museum publishing and is a commentator and reviewer who speaks on the arts and their relation to popular culture. She divides her time between London and New York.

MARIANNA COPPO is an author/illustrator from Italy. She studied editorial illustration at MiMaster in Milan and now focuses on freelance illustration. Her debut picture book, Petra, received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. She is also the creator of Ray, Thingamabob, A Very Late Story, Such a Good Boy and, with author Daisy Bird, Whose Poo?. Her most recent book is The Boy and the Mountain.

Editorial Reviews

06/05/2023

In this work from previous collaborators Bird and Coppo (Whose Poo?), two rodent siblings reluctantly sit down with their father to watch a “very serious show... about some of the most important moments in history!” From a pitch-black screen, an announcer intones, “Before there was anything, there was just this silent space. Lovely and quiet. Not a single sound.” Well, except for one: “PFFFT!” After the unmistakable onomatopoeia for passing gas appears in a tiny green speech balloon, the screen fills with images of a newly birthed cosmos. Now the sibs are totally on board (“Best show ever!” one declares), and as the program portrays time marching on, it highlights additional small but evidently powerful farts as fueling major turning points, including dinosaurs’ “exSTINKtion” and the appearance of that enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. “I don’t understand this show at all,” Dad says—but even he eventually proves capable of a noteworthy emanation of his own, suggesting that whether or not history is doomed to repeat itself, the sound of its resonance is “PFFFT!” Gouache artwork has a cut-paper tableau quality, giving each scene a kind of history-book dignity that’s ripe for being mischievously undermined. Ages 4–8. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"How else were Daisy Bird and Marianna Coppo supposed to follow their previous collaboration, Whose Poo? In the equally uninhibited picture book The Big Bang and Other Farts: A Blast Through the Past, the returning collaborators deliver not only unremitting humor but also something to think about between laughs." —STARRED REVIEW, Shelf Awareness

"[The art gives] each scene a kind of history-book dignity that’s ripe for being mischievously undermined." —Publishers Weekly

"Child readers will be as tickled as the mouselings are by this twisted history, and they will certainly love searching for the green speech bubble with "Pffft!” in each historical scenario." —Booklist

From the Publisher

2023-04-12
What the beginning of the universe, the Mona Lisa’s smile, and certain other epochal touchstones in between have in common.

Pandering again to audiences that can’t get enough of certain words—or in this case sound effects—often enough, the creators of Whose Poo? (2021) string together a series of events linked, in Coppo’s elementally simple gouache frames, by small green clouds emerging from one butt or another with disproportionate consequences. A family of mice sits down to watch a “very serious” documentary. “Best show ever!” squees a child to a discomfited parent as the first “PFFFT!” bursts into stars and galaxies, the next one from a tiny primordial fish drives animals out onto dry land, another from a volcano leads to the downfall of the dinosaurs (“Dad, is that why it’s called exSTINKtion?”), and later putts end an ice age, cause the Sphinx’s nose to fall off, knock the apples off Isaac Newton’s tree, and other watershed events. Critics might carp that the fumes sending a diversely hued crew of Vikings fleeing to North America come from a whale’s blowhole…but any port (so to speak) in a storm, and it’s not like accuracy is a priority here. Dad as usual becomes the (wait for it) butt of the joke as he produces the biggest PFFFT! of all while indignantly reaching for the remote’s off switch. Why dads should be unamused by this breezy revisionist history is anybody’s guess. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Strictly for cheap laffs. (Picture book. 4-6)

Kirkus Reviews