Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Thank you to NetGalley and NorthSouth Books for the ARC of Mayhem at the Museum (September, 2025), a soon-to-be published children’s picture book.

This delightfully illustrated picture book is the story of young Yuri who is terrified of birds. Okay, that’s fine. The story goes on, however, that Yuri is at a museum observing a large skeleton of a dinosaur when the coat check attendant releases his parakeet to do an evening inspection flight around the museum, and this terrifying event (to young Yuri at least) sets off a chain reaction that causes mayhem!

I can only imagine the questions if I were reading this to a young child. What is a coat check attendant? Why is he/she allowed to bring a pet to work? How can the parakeet do an inspection? What is he/she inspecting?

But, the biggest question of all would be, “Why is Yuri so afraid of little tiny pet birds?”

What happens next is understandable, though, to a child. Something expensive and rare gets broken. And it’s his fault. I know this feeling all too well.

When I was very young, my brothers and I were fighting over what TV show to watch after school one afternoon. We were too close to the large console TV (very popular in the 70s) and knocked my mother’s crystal decanter off of the top of the TV. It crashed to the hardwood floors and scattered into small pieces of very expensive crystal shards. To top it all off, the decanter had been my grandmother’s and she had brought it with her ACROSS THE ATLANTIC OCEAN when she immigrated from Scotland in the late 1920s.

My mother heard the crash, came running into the living room and froze when she saw what had happened. She sat down on the floor amidst all that broken glass and cried until my father got home from work. She had so few things from her mother, who died when she was still a teenager.

As soon as we heard his car drive up, we scattered much like the broken shards of crystal had done a bit earlier. It is something I always regretted, and I’m sure my brothers do as well.

The difference in these two stories is that Yuri is comforted and the adults around him join together to fix the problem. They put the dinosaur back together, sort of. The lesson of the day is never be afraid to ask for help. Kind adults will step in and help you fix the problem.

I’m not sure it works that way with a broken dinosaur or a broken decanter. As a parent of adult daughters who had their normal share of shenanigans, and as a middle school educator for nearly 20 years, I think part of the lesson should have been proper behavior around expensive and rare things, regardless of one’s fears and phobias. How many field trips did I take students on where ground rules were thoroughly reviewed for days before the trip? How to behave in a museum, check. No running, no touching, no shenanigans, check.

Oh, and the broken decanter? About 10 years later I was able to go on a high school trip to Europe, and when in Murano, Italy, I used most of my spending money to purchase a crystal decanter that looked as close as possible to my mother’s treasure. Sadly, it didn’t matter, because in 2005 Hurricane Katrina claimed it along with everything else in my parents’ home.

All in all, this is a charming book, a sweet lesson for Yuri (and younger readers of this book), and for me the best part of Mayhem at the Museum is the community of museum goers, from all walks of life, bonding together to help Yuri out of his awful bind.