The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business is a far grosser offering than most would initially infer from the title. This picture book houses not a cute little tale about a loveable mole who, despite knowing it’s none of his business, pokes his nose in anyway, but a twisted tale of farmyard revenge. It is, in a word, brilliant; in ten, it’s probably the best children’s picture book of all time.
The premise is simple: a mole wakes up with a turd festering on his head (the titular “business”). As it’s clearly not “his business”, the enraged mole subjects a series of animals to the most vile form of interrogation - he makes them take a dump for him, to rule them out of the running as it were. It’s Cinderella and the slipper all over again, only backwards, and with poo. From any child’s perspective, that’s got to be a winner.
Eventually, the mole enlists the help of a pair of flies to identify the culprit for him, and then the book concludes with a resplendently puerile act of tit-for-tat retaliation that would make even the most morally vacant of children’s authors cringe.
However, The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business isn’t all faecal fun and games - there’s a strong argument to say that it’s educational too. After all, there can’t be that many books on the market that will teach your child how to differentiate between various types of animal excrement.
