Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1332647 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Combine in a large-format book some 60 outrageously funny poems about food. Illustrate liberally with whimsy and panache, and the result might be this deliciously gleeful volume. The menu on the back cover of Westcott's clever collection promises poems about "the fun of eating" organized into four overlapping categories: "eating silly things," "eating foods we like," "eating too much" and "manners at the table." Westcott puts the emphasis on fun: she not only spices the volume with Miss Piggy's advice about diets ("Never eat more than you can lift") but adds Nora Ephron's advice about spinach ("Divide into little piles. Rearrange into new piles. After five or six maneuvers, sit back and say you are full"). Even poems by the generally decorous Eve Merriam and Myra Cohn Livingston seem to reflect the cheeky good humor and giddiness of the more numerous selections by Florence Parry Heide, Ogden Nash and Jack Prelutsky. Westcott's lively and comical watercolors--like those she does for a regular column in Gourmet magazine--will satisfy anyone with a taste for humor. All ages.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 1-4-A food-oriented collection of limericks, free verse, and other styles of rhyme by such well-known poets and humorists as Ogden Nash, Eve Merriam, Florence Parry Heide, Jack Prelutsky, John Ciardi, David McCord, and others. Poems about popular treats, disgusting eating habits, and outrageous table manners are among the categories included. Westcott's rollicking cartoons, done in ink and acrylics, capture the fun. Even reluctant readers will find this tempting title hard to resist.
Sally R. Dow, Ossining Public Library, NY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ages 3-8. Whether the food is delicious or gross, eating is a sensual experience and a social one. Westcott has chosen 60 poems about the joy and mess of mealtimes, and her wild cartoon illustrations in very bright acrylic colors express the general uproar, especially when animal appetite collides with decorous table manners. There are poems about eating silly things (including eels and "A sliver of liver"), about eating foods we like (including "oodles of noodles"), about eating too much ("I know an old lady who swallowed a cow"), and about manners and the lack thereof ("My mother says I'm sickening"). Prelutsky, Kennedy, Heide, McCord, and other popular children's poets are well represented; so are Ogden Nash and other masters of nonsense; and there are lots of limericks and folk verses, rhymes and puns. The illustration for "School Lunch" may be the best of all, dramatizing the anguish of Hoberman's protagonist: "Each time I bring it / I wish I had bought it / But each time I buy it / I wish I had brought it." Nonsense verse like this is a great way to show kids that words are full of laughter and song. Hazel Rochman