Where else but Canada would you find a town that turns its main street into a giant tubing run? Or witness a Mission Impossible-style heist where a thief drops down through the ceiling and makes off with over $120,000 worth of hockey sticks? Not to mention the slippery — or was that sticky? — bandits who stole 20,000 liters of maple syrup. In an engaging, hilarious and always fascinating exploration of geography, history, wildlife, science, culture, food, art — and giant roadside attractions — this is Canada at its most jaw-droppingly unusual and innovative.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea . . . : Canadian Feats, Facts and Flubs
Written by Ted Staunton and Will Staunton.
Published in 2020 by Scholastic.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea… is a wacky factbook. It features Canada’s largest structures, crazy challenges, old crazy laws, and even a toe kissing bar! This 100% true book is filled with stories, some ingenious others stupid.
This interesting book is one of my favourites in the RMBA selection. Ted and Will Staunton use pictures, categories, and true stories, teaching me many things about Canada I have never known before. This book is filled to the brim with interesting facts that makes the reader want to read it to the end. The authors also make the contents of the book so that anyone and everyone would be more than happy to read it nonstop until they’re done. When I finished reading this book I kept thinking about it and I can still remember some of it to this day!
Ted and Will have done a wonderful job portraying the purpose of this book. To teach people more about Canada. I have learned a lot from this book, and I think and hope that other readers will too. One part of the book features a large trade, where Kyle Macdonald traded a red paperclip for a pen shaped like a fish. Then he traded the pen for a doorknob. After a while of trading, he finally got himself a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. It was a crazy story, practically unbelievable, but now I know it’s real because of the book. It Seemed Like A Good Idea… is one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read. I have never really thought of Canada as interesting but this book has changed my mind completely. A lot of these stories were so irregular that they seemed almost fictional to me. That is what made this book so interesting.
It Seemed Like A Good Idea… was like a spark of a wildfire to me. It will probably make me want to start reading books I usually don’t like reading. This book would be on my want-to-read list, and I would surely recommend it. It is so filled with stories and other stuff anybody would be rolling around laughing in a matter of seconds.
January 23rd, 2022
It seemed like a good idea…
Written by Ted Staunton and Will Staunton
This book is about random facts about Canada. So random that, in the book, it states a shop that sells toes in their drinks. When I read this book it was very interesting, but I had a great few laughs. The book is fit for all readers because the cover really just grabs all attention with the goose eating donuts to the funky font. It seems like that genuine book that you could never get bored of no matter how much you read it. The book has a bunch of random facts that you would never be able to find in Canada but could only find in this book.
Sincerely,
Grade 6 student at Hillhurst School
Book Review: It Seemed Like a Good Idea…
By: Ted and Will Staunton
It seemed like a good idea… was a fact book with tons of interesting information such as different vocabulary across the country, different foods, weird places, and a lot of other wonderfully random things.
This book gives a lot of interesting facts about Canada, This book contains a lot of information, personally, I think all Canadians should read this book, because the book easily grabs your attention and makes you want to keep reading, and I feel like most people won’t know the majority of these facts before reading the book.
For example, one of my favourite parts of this book was the crime part, because it showed how different Canada can be, and I also like that part because I thought it was also pretty funny. My favourite out of all of them was probably the one where the drunk man walked into a police car thinking it was a taxi.
I also like how in the book they dedicated a few pages to different provinces in Canada, I thought it was clever because you get to learn a lot about your country and the province you live in, I live in Alberta, and I’ve never thought there would be a lot of random stuff, but turns out, there is! There’s a giant perogy in Glendon and a giant sausage that can withstand winds 160km per hour in Mundare, totally unexpected.
Another part I liked was the geography part, about different names across the country, I thought it was pretty funny how there was a town in Saskatchewan called Forget, and a place called Come by Chance in Newfoundland.
Overall I think the book gives a detailed description of a lot of stuff in Canada, I suggested this book to a lot of my classmates and most of them enjoyed it, and I think Ted and Will did a really great job.
This book is full of fun, wacky, and old facts. Most of them I didn’t know, and I am a Canadian fact wiz. The book was also full of jokes and puns. I would recommend this to anyone, and I would read a sequel of it. ANYONE who is bored can read this over and over and over again. 6 stars if it were possible