In “monstrous” revisions of some traditional Mother Goose rhymes, Sierra plays to an audience of modern youngsters who adore ghouls and gore. Most of the poems follow the general rhyming patterns and meters of the originals. But the images are all Sierra’s. Little Miss Mummy keeps her guts in a jar and a spider inside her. There are three piranhas waiting to pounce in “Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” The zombie who lives in a shoe has maggots. Cannibal Horner eats people potpie. Davis’s acrylic and colored-pencil illustrations are appropriately amusing and disgusting. The layout is imaginative and visually exciting. Each poem, with one exception, covers one-fourth of a two-page spread, while the illustration covers the remaining three-quarters and seems to spill over onto the text. The layout poses a problem in a few instances, when key elements of the illustration disappear in the fold and spoil the continuity. In addition, there is one poem in which the text is presented in scattered ribbons across both pages, so the eye does not scan the lines in correct order. But the poems and illustrations are great fun and should achieve a delighted reaction of “E-e-e-w Gross.” Images of a killer tomato, vampire sheep, and those lurking piranhas in the bathtub might be just a bit nightmarish for really young readers. But it’s a fiendishly good time for everyone else. (Poetry. 8-11)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-202034-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Gulliver/Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hall (The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, 1985, etc.), offers up a chestnut-flavored alternative for younger readers, matching roughly contemporary illustrations to one or two selections from each of 57 American poets. To the usual suspects—Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” and even Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”—he adds more recent works from the likes of Jack Prelutsky, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Janet S. Wong; he also includes three poems attributed somewhat baldly to an “Anonymous Native American.” The art comprises a gallery of American illustration, from crude 18th-century woodcuts, through Jessie Willcox Smith, to Marcia Brown and the Dillons. Writing that “poetry is most poetry when it makes noise,” Hall recommends these verses for reading aloud and memorization, exhorting parents and children to appreciate how they “preserve a moment of the American past.” A safe collection, seldom veering from the canon. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512373-5
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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