The Robots are Coming, and Other Problems

A collection of short illustrated poems decribes various things that the imaginative young reader might fear or worry about, including a mummy, a pirate, and giant ants. A first book.

In cartoonist Rash's clever tongue-in-cheek children's book debut, an array of shady characters, including an evil hypnotist and a voodoo doll, occasions light verse. The title poem shows zombielike robots slurping too much coffee before invading the world ("The robots are perking more mugs than required/ .../ The caffeine is working./ They're totally wired./ Jittery, zappity, burp"). "Dr. X" milks laughs from a nerdy criminal who wears microscopes on his goggles: "He was jailed because he failed/ to NOT see what we can't./ He has seen our bones and spleens/ and bras and underpants." And in the wittiest selection, a man complains, "In H-E-double hockey sticks/ the D-E-V-I-hockey stick/ just C-A-double hockey sticked/ me on his special phone." Rash uses comic-book panels and sequential images to pack a lot of action into his pages. For instance, a creature of the night transforms from grinning beast to remorseful man in eight frames that spell "werewolf," and then sends a get-well bouquet to his bandaged victim. The B-movie scenarios unfold in matte hues of rust, chemical yellow, copper green and oxidized gray on a coarse background; every classic monster looks to be painted on gritty black sandpaper. Rash isn't the first to poke fun at classic monsters, but he has a keen sense for the pleasingly corny. Ages 4-up. (Oct.)
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Gr. 2-5. Rash, whose artwork has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, offers a picture-book collection of 16 tongue-in-cheek poems featuring such bizarre creatures as robots, an abominable snowman, a werewolf, and the Loch Ness Monster. The tongue-in-cheek poems are punctuated by jokes, and rhyme is played for laughs: robots brew coffee in their heads ("Perkit, clankity, glurp") and get a case of coffee nerves ("Jittery, zappity, burp"). The screwball gouache and ink illustrations are played for laughs, too. They zig and zag across the pages, affording a great sense of movement and plenty of fun: the cover illustration, for example, shows robots making off with parts of the book's title. Older children might be inspired to write some goofy horror poetry of their own. Connie Fletcher
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