By Jack Prelutsky
Over a hundred short, funny poems — burping monsters, a teacher with a meatball for a head, an ice cream shop selling cobweb mold and garlic ripple — and a title poem whose tough new tormentor on the block turns out, in the last line, to be a girl.
Prelutsky writes the kind of poems that get read out loud without anyone asking. Bleezer's ice cream shop stocks flavors like cobweb mold and garlic ripple. Baloney Belly Billy has a stomach that won't stop rumbling. The title poem sizes up the toughest, meanest new arrival on the block, who punches hard and pulls hair, and saves for the last line that she's a girl. James Stevenson's loose cartoons run through the whole thing, and with more than a hundred poems, most of them short, there's always another title too good to skip.
Prelutsky knows what a seven-to-ten-year-old thinks is funny, and he never softens it or explains it. Most poems are built around a great title and a payoff, which is how a reluctant reader tends to work: skim the contents, find the one about the burping monster, collect the reward. They're short, the cartoons carry the tone, and a child who won't sit through a chapter will happily read twenty of these back to back. If your child liked Silverstein, this is the obvious shelf over.