Olivia Munn settles in to read Ashley Spires’ picture book ‘The Most Magnificent Thing,’ and within the first few pages, a small girl and her dog are already deep into one of the most relatable disasters in children’s literature. What follows is not just a story about building something from scratch. It is a story about the specific, suffocating feeling of knowing exactly what you want to make and being unable to get there, a feeling most people carry well past childhood.
Wrong things, then wronger things
The girl in the book has a vivid picture in her mind. She knows how the magnificent thing will look. She knows how it will work. She has made things before, so this should be easy. Her dog, her best friend and self-appointed assistant, is ready. Together they gather supplies and find a quiet spot to work.
It goes badly almost immediately. The first attempt does not look right. Her assistant picks it up and gives it a shake. It does not feel right either. It is, in the book’s own plain words, all wrong. She tries again. She smooths and wrenches and fiddles. Still wrong. She tries square, round, legs, antennae, fuzzy, long, short, rough, smooth, big, small. One version even smells of stinky cheese. None of them are magnificent.
The frustration builds until it becomes physical. Her hands feel too big to work. Her brain is too full of all the not-right things. She smashes pieces into shapes, jams parts together, and then the pain in her finger rushes to her brain and she explodes. She tells her dog, flatly, that she quits.
The walk that changes everything
Her assistant suggests a walk. It is not much help at first. But bit by bit, the mad gets pushed out of her head. Along the trail, she starts coming across the pile of wrong things she made earlier. She braces for the bad feelings to return. Instead, she notices something: some parts of the wrong things are actually quite right. The bolts on one. The shape of another. The wheel-to-seat ratio of the next. By the time she reaches the end of the trail, she knows exactly what to do.
She works slowly this time. Carefully. The afternoon fades into evening. When she finally finishes, the thing leans a little to the left, it is heavier than expected, and the color could use some work. But it is exactly what she wanted. She and her dog climb aboard and take it for a spin. They are not disappointed.
Munn, speaking after the reading, was candid about why the girl’s breakdown landed so hard for her personally: ‘I like it when she says she’s going to quit. As a kid, I think I always wanted to be able to scream, like, I quit!’ She described a childhood shaped by a mother who would not allow her to walk away from piano, Taekwondo, or swimming. At the time, she wanted out of all of it. Looking back, she is grateful she never got the exit she was asking for.
The page count she noticed
Munn made one sharp observation about the structure of the book itself: when the girl announces she quits, there are still many pages left. That gap between the declaration and the ending, she pointed out, is the quiet signal to any child paying attention that quitting was never really the last word.
The book was written and illustrated by Ashley Spires, and is dedicated, in its opening lines, to ‘all the little perfectionists of the world.’
The dog, for his part, never doubted her for a moment.
