ANYTHING BUT A GRABOOBERRY

Readers with a taste for concrete poetry or typographic quips in general will enjoy this import. Designer/illustrator Ramanathan takes Ravishankar’s nonsense verse—“I wouldn’t mind if I could be a 12-armed octopus / or a pin-striped hippo-po-po-po-potamus / Anything I’d like to be / But please please please not a grabooberry”—and, using only the text plus a few extra doodles, works major visual changes from spread to spread, blowing some letters up to page size, scattering others in looping lines, shifting abruptly from red to green and back, and slipping in clever sight gags, such as an i that’s dotted in more ways than one. Letter forms get put through more ingenious, not to mention strenuous, paces in de Vicq de Comptiers’s Bembo’s Zoo (2000), but this makes a silly-sounding, giggle-inducing read-aloud for younger audiences. (Picture book. 5-7)