One of a reviewer's greatest fears is that we've simply misunderstood a book completely. Here are samples of the kind of reviews we're afraid we might one day in exhaustion publicly embarass ourselves with. [Inspired by New York magazine's Near Misses contest]

--Deborah Stevenson, Assistant Editor

• The Way Things Work: Mr. Macaulay's bitter indictment of our complacent society addresses the problem at its most basic technological level...
• 10, 9, 8: This attractively illustrated counting book suffers unfortunately from a binding error that presents the pages in reverse order...
• Tuck Everlasting: Natalie Babbit picks up where George Selden's Cricket in Times Square left off in this story of the enduringly popular cricket, Tuck...
• The Little House: Virginia Lee Burton's fictionalized conflation of Wilder's stories is compact indeed...
• Bull Run: Though the individual voices are touching, Fleischman never brings readers close to that famous annual ceremony on the streets of Pamplona...
• A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Willard's painstaking historical research reveals a little-known side of the mystic poet--that of hotelier...
• The Boggart: If Cooper wishes this to be as definitive a biography of the late star of Casablanca as the title suggests, she'd have done well to pay more attention to orthography...
• Invincible Louisa: Since photographs of Miss Alcott are readily available, it seems odd that Meigs rests an entire book on this thesis about the evanescence of the author's appearance...
• My Side of the Mountain: This fictionalized account of the famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys...
• Charlie Parker Plays BeBop: Many Block fans will be frustrated at the absence of any mention of Weetzie, Cherokee, and the gang in this picture-book sequel...
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: In this rousing rejoinder to M.E. Kerr's I'll Love You When You're More Like Me, Judy Blume...
• Missing May: It's good to see allegory back in children's books, but the search of young Summer for one of her component months is marred by seasonal inaccuracy; calendar buffs should stick to Blos' A Gathering of Days.
• Officer Buckle and Gloria: Looks like the artist's pulled a fast one on the author, however, because the illustrated canine antics are more interesting than the book's didactic safety lectures...
• Old Yeller: The book's main emphasis, the relationship between the protagonist and his eponymous hot-tempered and aging father, is distracted by a subplot about a dog...
• Eva: Even the most ardent anti-Peronistas will be shocked by Dickinson's revelations about the true fate of the Argentinian first lady...
• The Exiles: Paul Robeson, Svetlana Stalin, and Leon Trotsky are only a few of the political expatriates chronicled by McKay...
• Spite Fences: The art of swordplay is rarely depicted in children's literature, but Krisher's tale of the young Southerner, Spite, and his education in the art of the rapier...
• The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf: Scieszka's attempt to defend this usually reviled character, marred as it is by unchallenged bias and gaping holes in the wolf's credibility, is ultimately unsuccessful...

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