By Craig Smith
A cumulative rhyme about a three-legged donkey that gets one word longer every page until whoever is reading it out loud falls apart.
A man walks down the road and meets a donkey with only three legs. That makes it a wonky donkey. Turn the page: it has one eye as well, so now it's a winky wonky donkey. It likes country music, so it's a honky-tonky winky wonky donkey. It's tall and thin, then it's smelly, then it's small, then it's grumpy, and every single time the whole string has to be said again from the beginning, faster, with one more word bolted onto the front. By the last page you are saying spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey in one breath, and your child is watching you fail at it. That's the book. It was a song first, and it still moves like one.
It asks nothing of your child and everything of you, which is why it lands even when the child can't read a word. All they do is sit there and watch an adult take on a sentence that beats them. And because each page only adds one word, a three-year-old has the whole list memorised by the third reading and starts running ahead of you — so a book they cannot read becomes a book they are somehow reciting. The pictures do the other half: the donkey is drawn with such a hopeful, ridiculous face that the joke works before any of the words do.