The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes is a children's book by two men named Gary Rubinstein and Mark Pett.
It is about a girl named Beatrice Bottomwell, who has become famous in her town as the Girl Who Never Makes Mistakes because she has never in her life made a mistake.
However, when she trips and almost breaks some eggs at cooking class, she doesn't count that as a mistake because the eggs didn't break, but it's close enough to a mistake that she worries that she will make a proper mistake on her talent night.
And sure enough she does: she accidentally uses pepper instead of salt in her juggling act, which makes her hamster sneeze and pop a water balloon, which lands on her. Afterwards, she's happy but nobody's impressed by her anymore.
The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes provides examples of:
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: When Beatrice is juggling Humbert the hamster, he wears a cape and aviator's hat.
- Accidental Good Outcome: Beatrice attempts to juggle a water balloon, a pepper shaker, and Humbert the hamster, only for the latter to unleash an Ill-Timed Sneeze from the pepper. He pops the balloon with his claws and Beatrice ends up soaked from head to toe. The audience is shocked that someone as talented as her actually messed up for once, but they laugh anyway because of how hilarious it was, and Beatrice is just glad they had a positive response.
- Alliterative Name: Beatrice Bottomwell.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Carl Bottomwell, Beatrice's brother, likes to do crazy things like draw with his green beans, eat his crayons, and wear his cereal bowl on his head. At the end of the book, Beatrice also adopts his mannerisms.
- Extreme Omnivore: Carl eats his crayons.
- Failures on Ice: Beatrice, Millie, and Sarah all fall down a lot while ice skating.
- Lost Aesop: There seems to be An Aesop in there somewhere, but it's hard to find. It could be that Mistakes Are Not the End of the World, but if Beatrice truly had never made mistakes in her life, then wouldn't suddenly making a mistake be reason to be concerned? (for an analogy, imagine if Alice spoke perfectly her whole life but then suddenly got a Speech Impediment for no apparent reason, only for Bob to tell her, "It's OK, Alice- lots of people have speech impediments!"). The Aesop could also be not to pressure kids not to make mistakes but, again, if Beatrice had truly never made a mistake in her life, people would have reason to be impressed.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The audience are "stunned" when the water balloon pops on Beatrice because "they couldn't believe that the Girl Who Never Made Mistakes made a mistake".
- Pepper Sneeze: When Beatrice accidentally juggles pepper instead of salt, it makes Humbert sneeze.
