I Need a New Butt! - Dawn McMillan - ★★

AUTHOR: Dawn McMillan

ILLUSTRATOR: Ross Kinnaird

GENRE: Children's Picture Book

PUBLICATION DATE: September 1, 2012

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A children’s picture book with some questionable inclusions. My low rating isn't because this talks about butts, but because I found it poorly written.

Plot Preview:

Written in first person, the young narrator is sad at having discovered a crack in his butt. He wonders where and when he might have broken it. (He’s fairly certain a fart caused it to split.) He then mulls over various butt options he could try as a replacement, going from the arty to the outrageous. But will these options work on a broken bottom?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that kids like good butt stories. And this one seemed to have the makings of one. But I don’t get its appeal.

Honestly, the title got me cracking up. I was hoping for a cheeky story about how the boy discovers that all butts are cracked. However, while the story started off excellently, it got wilder and sillier as it progressed, which isn't what I expected. Just when I was hoping it would deliver a good/reasonable ending, it closed abruptly, thereby sealing my low rating.

Such books obviously cannot be read with logic. I too let many silly things slide in this silly tale. But one question that I cannot stop myself from asking is: how did the boy not realise that his pet dog too had a cracked butt? Was he so self-centred? Then again, he was actually ready to sell his dog to earn enough money for a new butt – nope, not done! Pets ought to be valued!

The story is written in rhyming prose – not my favourite style but the lines do rhyme decently. However, there are many difficult words/concepts in the content. Will younger readers know the meaning of ‘titanium’ and ‘chrome’? Will they understand what’s a 1960s sport coupé?

The illustrations are in tune with the story, and some of the artwork is quite funny. But a couple of the sketches (and their corresponding verses) didn’t work for me. Like the one with an artist painting a mural on the boy’s naked butt or of the boy ramp-walking with his naked bottom and the audience evaluating his “outfit”. Kids might find this funny but it made me uncomfortable.

Amazon says that the official target age group is 6-10 years, but the story might be too juvenile for the older kids of this age range. Some other sites recommend this to 4-8 year olds, but the younger kids in that segment won't understand most of the middle section. So unless you have kids who can laugh at the word/image of ‘butt’ without wanting any further explanation, this isn't worth a purchase.

Overall, I expected to chuckle aloud at this story but it just didn’t click with me beyond the first six pages which were genuinely funny. Bathroom humour usually works well in kids’ books, but this is a sad exception. I still think the “broken butt” idea was fabulous; it just deserved better execution.

Then again, the story aims at young boys, and I have never been one in my life. So who knows? Maybe they will find this a cracking [Sorry! Couldn’t resist this pun!] adventure, especially as they will not indulge in as many ifs and butts [Whoopsie! Sorry again!] while reading this. But in all honesty, I cannot recommend it strongly.

On an aside, this book came into my life because I read about a Mississippi school administrator whose employment was terminated in 2022 after he read this book aloud to his class of second-graders. It has been a four-year long battle, but he has finally received (some) justice. In Jan 2026, the Mississippi Court of Appeals reversed the school board’s decision to fire him, calling the original decision “arbitrary and capricious’. I appreciate this decision. Even though this book didn’t work for me, I believe that there’s nothing wrong in silly children’s books referencing perfectly natural things like butts or farts. Many children learn to love reading by beginning with such books. Some adults really need to get off their high horses and think with the heart of a child.