In A Bad Case of Stripes, author and illustrator David Shannon cleverly addresses the issues of conformity and marching to one's own drum. Young Camilla Cream, who loves lima beans, awakens on the first day of school and, after agonizing over the perfect outfit, discovers she is covered with multicolored stripes! The doctor is summoned, and he can find nothing wrong with her. The next day, she goes to school and "when the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, her stripes turned red, white, and blue, and she broke out in stars!"

The class has a great time discovering what else she can do, and after that she stays home from school while a seemingly endless array of Specialists and Experts rush to try to cure her. Her parents try everything, even having an Environmental Therapist come to try to help Camilla. Unfortunately, with each attempted cure, she just gets worse. Finally, "an old woman who was just as plump and sweet as a strawberry" knocked on the door. She offered Camilla something different than the others, which finally cures her and offers up the explanation for Camilla's pigmentation problems.

The lesson in this story is subtle but effective, and made perfectly clear on the last few pages. The book makes a wonderful point about being yourself, and the brightly colored, almost psychedelic, vivid illustrations stuck with me for several days after reading it for the first time.

I personally found both the text and illustrations delightful and imaginative, but I was surprised to discover several pages of very negative reviews on Amazon.com where parents complained that they or their children had been traumatized by the pictures and/or story. It made me wonder if they had failed to grasp the lesson, and focused solely on the imagery. While a person who is striped certainly is different, I really felt there was nothing scary in the book at all. I wonder if this is a reflection of modern attitudes towards non-conformity?