Making Friends with Frankenstein - Hardcover

Colin McNaughton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0744530024 ISBN 13: 9780744530025

Publisher: Walker Books, 1993

Synopsis

Making Friends with Frankenstein A Book of Monstrous Poems and Pictures

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

With a dash of Monty Python and a whiff of Jack Prelutsky, McNaughton's ( Who's That Banging on the Ceiling? ) deliciously outrageous poems are filled with wacky cartoon characters, nimble puns and clever spoofs. Three blue ghosts perform a "phantomine"; "in the sandbox, making trouble" are "seven witches, hubble, bubble. / (Sandwitches!)." An "Ode to the Invisible Man" is featured on an otherwise blank page, while an "Abominable Verse" about a yeti (which "rhymes so neatly with spaghetti") is illustrated by a view of the preposterous beast guzzling wine and gobbling pasta. Both poems and art are wickedly comic rather than horribly offensive, though there is plenty of noise ("slobber, chomp, slurp, gulp!") and an abundance of gross mischievousness. Frankenstein's monster is chopped to bits to the refrain "May he rest in pieces," and a thug eats a cockroach sandwich ("Hate the taste / But love the crunch!"). From the Dracula endpapers to the romp through Jekyll and Hyde Park, McNaughton's saucy good fun contains enough comic-strip verve and zany comedy to liven up even the "biggest monster party / That there's ever monster been!" Ages 4-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Gr. 2-4, younger and older for reading aloud. Full of puns, parodies, and gross insults, McNaughton's nonsense verse and comic illustrations wallow in slime and slobber and monstrous distortion. He takes all our delicious, shivery fears and reinvents them. His play is nowhere more fantastic than when he's taking our most banal phrases literally. "Make a friend" takes place in a laboratory. The same kind of mischief erupts in word and watercolor picture with "wet blanket" and "cold feet" and "I've lost my head" and "May he rest in pieces." Much of the pleasure is in the sound of words and their rhyme, whether it's a chant to send to your worst enemy or a celebration of the ooze-zombie from the slime-pits of grunge. For those who understand the references to things like Jekyll and Hyde, there's extra fun; but it doesn't take long to see the joke about the cross-eyed Cyclops or the yeti that rhymes so neatly with spaghetti. A must for Halloween, but this is a collection that kids will laugh over and repeat all year long, especially if they like their "human beans on toast." Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0744530024
• ISBN 13: 9780744530025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 94