A Child's Garden of Weirdness: Illustrations, Verse, and Worse - Hardcover

Gautier, Dick

9780804818254: A Child's Garden of Weirdness: Illustrations, Verse, and Worse

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804818258 ISBN 13: 9780804818254

Publisher: Tuttle Pub, 1993

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Weird poems to amuse and amaze the reader.

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From Publishers Weekly:

This puerile collection of verse aims for MAD Magazine -style humor, but for the most part winds up being merely tasteless. Although some of Gautier's subjects (messy rooms, fear of the dark, why dinosaurs are extinct) are benign enough, he often relies on scatological references. This, for instance, from a poem entitled "Gerald," about a boy whose chief source of delight is in disgusting others: "He used most of his bodily fluids / To do things I cannot mention / Well he didn't feel smart or funny / How else could he get attention?" And then there's Buford, the overachieving feline who proudly presents his family with several dead rodents, then a dead horse and, finally, a cadaver from the morgue ("No odor thank goodness, however the face was grayish blue"). Many of the poems scan awkwardly ("Marguerite was petite and quite sweet / But boy did she have big feet / It seemed that everyone she met, / wouldn't let her forget / The enormity of her deformity"). Gautier provides similarly unaccomplished caricatures; an actor, he is perhaps best known for his performances in Broadway's Bye Bye Birdie and TV's Get Smart . All ages.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 1-4-It's a shame the way some movie stars assume they can be writers of children's books. Of the 32 poems here, illustrated with Gautier's garish, exaggerated cartoons, 12 are downright boring, and very few are imaginative or weird. The chatty style is marred by poor punctuation, trite phrasing, verbosity, adult humor, and the occasional forced rhyme. A few of the narrative story poems are fun, but Gautier obviously feels the need to moralize, and some of the selections go on too long. The line drawings, filled in with colored pencils, are grotesque. All of the characters are ugly, but the Asian and black children are really evil-looking stereotypes. It takes more than rhymes to create poetry.
Susannah Price, Boise Public Library, ID
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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