David and Goliath With a Twist: Fun­ny Clich­es that Tell the Clas­sic Story

After clean­ing his room, Joshua’s moth­er rewards him with a bed­time sto­ry. At his request, she tells him the sto­ry of David and Goliath, but warns him: ​“It’s a great sto­ry, but it may be a bit scary — so I hope you don’t get but­ter­flies in your stom­ach.” Addi­tion­al idioms pep­per her retelling. Goliath is described as being ​“as big as a barn and armed to the teeth,” the Jew­ish peo­ple were ​“at the end of their rope,” and David ​“suc­ceed­ed with fly­ing col­ors.” Each phrase is empha­sized with a bold, out­lined, enlarged pur­ple text and Joshua imag­ines them lit­er­al­ly. While the illus­tra­tions are rather gar­ish and flat they do humor­ous­ly depict Goliath ​“skat­ing on thin ice,” with ​“a screw loose” and ​“bark­ing up the wrong tree.” The phras­es are explained on the bot­tom of each page and a list of ​“Cliché Def­i­n­i­tions” is append­ed to the back of the book. A cliché is a trite, stereo­typed expres­sion that has been overused but the author’s exam­ples seem more like idioms — phras­es that are not tak­en lit­er­al­ly. Nonethe­less, this is a fun retelling of the famil­iar sto­ry and an enter­tain­ing way to intro­duce young read­ers to both idioms and clichés. Rec­om­mend­ed for ages 4 – 8.