Product Description

Old Monster Goose has turned Mother Goose's world of nursery rhymes inside out! Here she presents twenty-five deliciously disgusting poems, filled with rodents and maggots, zombies and ghouls, spiders, and of course, monsters.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #434759 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 56 pages

From Amazon.com
Something has happened to good old Mother Goose--she's not the same kindly storyteller she once was. In fact, that isn't Mother Goose tapping away at her laptop computer at all. It's Monster Goose! With a diabolical grin beneath her granny glasses and fangs peeking out from her beak, this twisted matriarch wreaks marvelously evil havoc on 25 favorite nursery rhymes. Now featuring ghouls, vampire bats, and cannibals, these verses appeal to the perverse corner in every reader's mind. Just a taste:

There was an old zombie who lived in a shoe.
She had so many maggots, she didn't know what to do.
So she soaked them in soapsuds and painted them green.
She'll be giving them out next Halloween.

Not for the faint of heart, Judy Sierra's grisly rhymes are accompanied by such fabulously hideous illustrations by Jack E. Davis (the Zack Files series, Bedhead, etc.), any potential nightmares will be diverted by helpless giggles. Readers will delight in identifying the original classic nursery rhymes behind such titles as "Mary Had a Vampire Bat," "Weird Mother Hubbard," "Hush, Little Monster," and "Werewolf Bo-Creep." Sierra and Davis are an ingenious pair indeed. For more ghoulish nonsense, don't miss Sierra's The House that Drac Built. And for still more playful poems, try her Antarctic Antics: A Book of Penguin Poems. (Ages 5 and older) --Emilie Coulter

From Publishers Weekly
Sierra (There's a Zoo in Room 22) and Davis (Bedhead) replace storybook characters with their ghoulish alter egos in this silly-scary Mother Goose knockoff. Every spread presents one revised rhyme and pictures the comical doppelg„nger of a familiar figure. In "Mary Had a Vampire Bat," a fiendish girl frightens her classmates with her pet: "She brought him out for show-and-tell;/ The teacher screamed and ran./ And school was canceled for a week,/ Just as Mary planned." Green-skinned "Cannibal Horner" chomps off his own thumb ("A tasty young morsel am I!"), and the usual mouse is upstaged in "Slithery, dithery, dock,/ The snake slid up the clock." Sierra invites a sing-along in "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Slug" and "The itsy-bitsy spider/ Climbed up the warthog's snout," and she turns a song of sixpence into an even less appetizing yarn: "Sing a song of sea slime, sewer gas, and sludge./ Four and twenty wharf rats dipped in mocha fudge." Davis, working in acrylics and colored pencil, crowds his illustrations with monsters, vermin and gross gags. But he indicates the verses' humor by giving the characters diabolical ear-to-ear grins, shifty eyes and skulky postures. The Goose has been spoofed before, but this volume strikes a nice balance between goofy and ghastly. Ages 5-8.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Gr 4 Up-Dark humor buffs or those who giggle at the gross will be roaring over Sierra's wonderfully crude and macabre take on 25 familiar nursery rhymes. Tamer ones like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Slug" may be shared with the younger set, but many, like "Cannibal Horner," need more maturity for full appreciation. Each rhyme is a winner ("Jack Sprat/Ate some fat/And drank some gasoline./He lit his pipe/And in one swipe/Invented Lean Cuisine"), made even more hilarious through illustration. Davis employs acrylics and colored pencil on watercolor paper to construct toothy cartoon characters that include a mad-scientist-eyed Mother Goose typing away on her laptop computer, a green cannibal "Eating a people potpie," and Addams Family-type characters. Your problem with this book will be keeping it available to students since teachers may hoard it for themselves.

Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

---

Customer Reviews

A Fun Twist to Halloween
My six year old daughter loves Halloween and has a strong imagination, I knew she would enjoy this book the first time I read it in the bookstore, it's funny and witty. The illustrations are great and the poems are kooky and fun.

A Poets Pleasure
As the mother of a very imaginative young poet who also likes Emily Dickinson, we found this book to be delightful. Having read so very many rhyming book that were beginning to become blaze this was a refreshing change. She still sings the rhymes and so does her older sister. We would recommend this book to anyone with an imagination.

The Book Scared My Children
We ordered the book through school. My 1st grade son can home and anounced that he received his book order and he had one book that would give him bad dreams. I looked through the book and found it was not quite what we had in mind. We were looking for something that would use the same old nursery stories, but with a difference. We wanted somthing to spark creativity and imagination, a look at adapting stories. It wasn't that kind of book. I felt it was scary and inappropriate for a young child.
My son didn't want to keep it so we tried to donate it to the school library. The librarian looked at it and said he didn't like to censure books, but this book was just not something they really would like.
We threw the book in the garbage.