Chill: Discover the Cool (and Creative) Side of Your Fridge

by Allan Peterkin, Mike Shiell (Illustrator)

The interactive guide for kids to make their family fridge the most cool and creative in the universe. Includes a history of refrigeration, 101 things to put on your fridge, how to create a fridge art consulting business, crafts, quizzes, games and more.

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2009

Reviews

[Canadian Children's Book Centre]

Chill: Discover the Cool (and Creative) Side of Your Fridge is a funny, colourful and extremely informative tell-all book for children. This hilarious text is packed full of interesting facts, comic-strips, quizzes, activities and ideas to not only entertain but educate the reader. Allan Peterkin’s writing is fluid and humorous weaving factual information with witty commentary. The illustrations are bright and appealing – a perfect backdrop for everything and anything you would ever want to know about your fridge. The text is divided into five sections. The first focuses on the history of refrigeration and the inevitable rise of a new art form – fridge art. The second section focuses on the science behind refrigeration and the psychological implications of fridge art. The third section provides the reader with a multitude of ideas on how to decorate your fridge, including a list of the 101 things you should hang on your fridge and a shorter list of the five things you should never hang on your fridge. The fourth section gives further tips and tricks to decorate your fridge to earn a possible profit, while the fifth and final section provides the reader with additional fridgecentric information. Overall, a great text full of interesting facts and great ideas.

Reviewed by Trevor J. Froates in Canadian Children's Book News
Spring 2009 VOL.32 NO.2

[Brandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Does the world really need a book on how to put things on your fridge? Apparently, yes. A little better than half this book is on creating "themes" to decorate the fridge (birthdays, holidays, horror movie, Buy-Me-a-Puppy Propaganda, etc.), plus directions on how to make some of the items, which are mostly magnetic poetry-type things. (There are separate directions for making individual word magnets, sentences, and headlines. I would think any reasonable kid would be able to extrapolate from "I write a single word on a magnet"to "I write several words on a magnet," but I guess not.)

The rest of the book--the first part, actually, making this review impressively out of sequence--is a bit of tongue-in-cheek history and theory on fridge art. The problem is that the history is a mix of accurate and way-off-the-mark information, talking about the ancient Romans and their ice pits before talking about how cave art is an early example of fridge art, since "you have cavemen figuring out that brontosaurus steaks don't smell as gross when they are kept in the coolest part of the cave."

Not the most useful book ever written, certainly, and it's hard to know who would bother picking this up.