Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude by Kevin O'Malley, Illustrated by Kevin O'Malley, Carol Heyer, and Scott Goto

Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude features a story within a story. A boy and a girl decide to make up their own fairy tale for their library project. As they make up the story, the boy and the girl have conflicting ideas about how the story should develop. The girl begins the story with a romantic, fantasized version of Princess Tenderheart who has eight ponies that a terrible giant begins to steal one by one. At this point, the boy interrupts and introduces the really cool muscle dude who rides in on his motorcycle and is hired to protect the last pony. The back-and-forth bickering between the girl and the boy continues until a very unique and "special" fairytale develops complete with the wedding of the motorcycle dude and the princess.

In a humorous way, Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude relays the differences between boy and girls' interests at this age. While girls are absorbed into the fantasy world of princesses, ideas of love, and happiness, boys focus on ideals of adventure, action, battle, and thrills. This creates problematic circumstances. By having a story within a story, this picture book shows the writing process. Although students may not know where their story is leading, eventually it will come together and tie back to itself.

In addition, different illustrators created the pictures based on whether the girl's story, the boy's story, or the two students' story was being relayed. While the girl's illustrations are filled with feminine characteristics of soft pinks and purples, flowers, and elaborate princess outfits, the boy story pictures use darker colors, scarier images, and other more masculine characteristics. Meanwhile, the boy and girl telling the story appear cartoon-like as they argue. Their conversation back-and-forth is told in word bubbles while their created fairy tale is the main text of this story. Even the ending of the story shows apparent differences as the motorcycle dude turned prince and princess have a baby. The girl wants the baby to be a girl; the boy wants the baby to be a boy...and so the story goes. The author and illustrators' biographies share their own stories of run-ins with girl and boys' differences.Recommended for ages 6-10, I feel that this is one of those books that both girls and boys can relate to because sometimes no matter what we do, girls don't always understand boys, and boys don't always understand girls.