Children's Book World

Kate Messner will be at Wallingford Elementary School on April 21, 2026

About Kate Messner

New York Times-bestselling author Kate Messner is passionately curious and has written over seventy books for kids who wonder, too. Her titles include award-winning picture books like Over and Under the Snow , The Next Scientist, and The Scariest Kitten in the World as well as novels for older readers like Breakout and The Trouble with Heroes. Kate also writes the popular History Smashers graphic nonfiction series and the Ranger in Time historical adventures, and she leads the multi-author team behind The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class chapter books. Kate lives on Lake Champlain and is a proud Adirondack 46er.
Learn more at www.katemessner.com

This offer is only available to Wallingford Elementary students and community.
Deadline extended! Please order by April 14, 2026 for personalization and event-day availability.
Books will be delivered to your school for distribution, so please be sure to fill out the student name, grade, and teacher fields!

About The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story

This book received a STARRED REVIEW from KIRKUS!

Readers will laugh aloud at the silly antics of a pair of opinionated sea mammals in a tale presenting one side of a debate when read front-to-back and the other side when read back-to-front, slyly revealing the way identical facts can be used to support opposite positions.

A boastful whale and a showboating otter compete in a battle of words to prove that each is the greatest animal ever to swim the seas. Read one way, the first-person text brags about whales’ superiority; read the other way, it extols how much better otters are. Using true information about the two marine species to make both arguments, Kate Messner’s adroit text and Brian Biggs’s giggle-worthy artwork brilliantly illustrate how the same words can be used to express contradictory opinions when speakers have a one-sided view of the world. Includes factual back matter about language usage and the actual similarities of whales and otters.