Book: Super-Completely and Totally the Messiest!

Overview
Judith Viorst’s 1999 picture book Super-Completely and Totally the Messiest! is a wry, affectionate look at sibling rivalry and the tug-of-war between order and chaos in a shared home. Leaning into a child’s point of view, Viorst uses exuberant exaggeration, rhythmic repetition, and sharp observational humor to explore what happens when one kid’s love of tidy systems collides with another’s irresistible impulse to spread, stash, and scatter. The title phrase itself functions like a playful badge and a stinging label, capturing how families sometimes reduce complicated kids to one defining trait, and how those labels can both inflame conflict and spark change.

Plot
Two siblings share a bedroom but not a lifestyle. One is a by-the-book straightener who inventories possessions and makes beds with ruler-straight corners. The other is a joyful collector who builds forts out of laundry, keeps “important stuff” in mysterious piles, and trusts that everything will eventually turn up. Their clashing habits turn everyday routines, getting dressed, finding homework, locating a favorite toy, into a series of mini-crises that ripple through the household. Parents try pep talks, threats, bribes, and chore charts, but nothing sticks for long. At one breaking point, the family even tries the classic solution of drawing a line down the middle of the room, declaring one side neat and the other side free-range. The line doesn’t hold. Mess migrates. Neatness creeps. Annoyances multiply into full-scale arguments, especially when the chaos spills onto the neat child’s territory and endangers something cherished.

After a particularly messy mishap upsets everyone, the siblings face a choice between doubling down on blame or figuring out a truce. What follows isn’t a magical overnight transformation but a hard-won, practical compromise. They sort, stack, and store together, invent rules they can live with, and, crucially, protect space for each other’s ways of being. Shared zones stay clear so no one trips over treasure, while personal zones allow for a certain amount of glorious, creative disarray. The clean-up becomes less a punishment than a cooperative project, and the bedroom shifts from battleground to a place both can claim.

Themes and Tone
Viorst treats neatness and messiness not as moral categories but as temperaments with upsides and downsides. The story validates the neat child’s need for predictability and the messy child’s delight in abundance and spontaneity. It also shows how labels like “the messiest” can stick to a kid’s identity, sometimes making the behavior worse, and how humor and empathy can loosen those labels. Beneath the slapstick is a gentle lesson in boundary-setting, negotiation, and mutual respect. The narration captures a child’s logic, absolute, dramatic, and very funny, so that both the grievances and the victories feel authentic rather than preachy.

Style and Visuals
The text’s lively cadence pairs with bustling, detail-rich illustrations that turn the room into a visual treasure hunt. Every corner teems with sight gags and tiny stories, a sock draped where it shouldn’t be, a rescued scrap that suddenly matters, inviting readers to linger, laugh, and recognize their own households. The art underscores the comedy of escalation and the satisfaction of incremental order, while never flattening the messy child into a punchline.

Why It Resonates
Families with shared rooms will recognize the negotiations, the shifting lines, and the strange way one person’s “junk” is another’s priceless collection. Super-Completely and Totally the Messiest! offers language for talking about chores and personal space without shaming, delivering a balanced message: organization can protect what you love, and a little creative clutter can make a room feel lived-in and alive. The ending promises not permanent perfection but a workable peace, which is exactly what most families need.