I'm Miss Misinformation, it's my gratifying task to tell you all you need to know, you only need to ask. The seas are thick with elephants the skies are purple straw, you measure with an octopus, you hammer with a saw.
Rat for lunch! Rat for lunch! Yum! Delicious! Munch munch munch! One by one or by the bunch—Rat, oh rat, oh rat for lunch!
October 4, 1999
In an inimitable troubadour tour-de-force, poet and performer Prelutsky (The Dragons Are Singing Tonight) serves up toe-tapping renditions of verses from his popular 1996 collection. Prelutsky's pleasantly warbling folksy singing voice nimbly leaps over tongue twisters and all sorts of playful rhymes in ditties like "Dixxer's Excellent Elixir," "Frenetica Fluntz" and "The Fummawummalummazumms." And he's sure to elicit still more giggles when he occasionally raises his voice to a humorously affected falsetto on "Gloppe's Soup Shoppe" and a few other tunes. In between guffaws, young listeners will find lots of topics with surefire appeal: "Bugs! Bugs!" "I Made Something Strange with My Chemistry Set" and "Eyeballs for Sale!" Backed by a strong children's chorus and talented musicians on fiddle, banjo, mandolin and more, Prelutsky seems right at home. (He's the one playing the kazoo.) This often boisterous mix of silliness and song should prove entertaining for the whole family. All ages.
Starred review from September 16, 1996
Poetry's bad boys are back again, teaming up to take another swipe at stuffiness. Prelutsky's predilection for playfulness percolates throughout this collection of slyly subversive rhymes, and he couldn't ask for a better partner in crime than Stevenson, whose droll, minimalist sketches so enlivened the duo's previous escapades (The New Kid on the Block; Something BIG Has Been Here). Once again Prelutsky demonstrates a robust appreciation of the absurd--and an uncanny knack for turning every possible subject on its head. Here his verse ranges from the short and sweet ("My mother makes me chicken,/ her chicken makes me cough./ I wish that when she made it,/ she took the feathers off") to poems of Jabberwockian silliness (the entry that begins " `I'm ceiling fad!' a money boned./ `Alas!' a carrot pride" is just one example). The pages are peppered with kinetic black-and-white drawings; like Thurber, Stevenson wrings a wealth of humor and emotion out of a few dashes of ink. If a laugh is what's needed, just hand over the keys and let these two drive. Ages 5-up.