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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #657519 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .18" h x 8.94" w x 11.12" l, .60 pounds
• 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.