Zany Zoo
By William Wise; illustrated by Lynn Munsinger
If I let you in on all the puns, you’ll be spared all the groans these poems induce. That wouldn’t be very nice of me, would it? But then, isn’t a tad unfair to inflict “one good tern deserves another” on me, or “she was a melon collie” or “you could say those sheep had been thoroughly cowed.”
Someone call the Humane Society: this is cruelty to animal lovers.
Most of these poems about our furry, feathered and scaly friends are simple, rhyming quatrains that seem to exist solely for their pun-chlines. Ha! See, I can be punny too.
Ugh.
I’m also unsure how I feel about the poems often relying on words kids wouldn’t understand, like “melancholy” in the first example. I had any number of English and journalism profs who said “keep it simple,” but I remember best this advice from movie critic Judith Crist: “Send ‘em to the dictionary.”
So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have to explain that, ah, a collie is a dog, see? And they don’t normally eat melons, and then we get this other word, which means a sad feeling and …”
… and by then your little one is sound asleep. Hurrah.
Rating: *\*\
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