Rhyme stew

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A collection of irreverant rhymes featuring characters from fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes - as you've never seen them before! From the tortoise and the hare and Hansel and Gretel to Ali Baba and Aladdin, these traditional stories will never seem the same again once you have had a taste of Roald Dahl's hilarious verse and Quentin Blake's suitably lively illustrations. An inventive collection for older children and adults alike, Rhyme Stew bubbles over with Roald Dahl's extraordinary humour and imagination.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The usual Dahl ingredients, irreverent wit and comic invention liberally spiced with the mildly suggestive or outre , suit this stew to the popular (if unrefined) taste of adolescents of every age. The longer verses are fractured take-offs of traditional tales: Dick Whittington, Ali Baba, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, Aladdin, et al. These sometimes ramble, then run out of steam, stopping rather than ending. Short spoofs of nursery rhymes (``A Little Nut Tree,'' ``Hey, Diddle, Diddle,'' ``Mary, Mary'') have more bite, while the original pieces (``A Hand in the Bird,'' ``Physical Training,'' ``The Price of Debauchery'') are chiefly naughty. Blake's illustrations add flavor and balance. Deliciously zany, they defuse the bleak inhumanity of Dahl's vision. Dahl's stew has low nutritive value, but its pungent aroma might tempt the reluctant reader to indulge. A selection of Dahl's short stories was published by Knopf last month ( LJ 4/15/90).--Ed.-- Patricia Dooley, Univ. of Washington Lib. Sch., Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Here are 15 less-than-clever rhyming parodies of classic children's stories and poems, including The Tortoise and the Hare , The Emp e r o r's New Clothes , Dick Whittington's Cat , Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves , Hansel and Gretel , etc. Most of Dahl's attempts at playful lasciviousness seem juvenile: ``As I was going to St. Ives / I met a man with seven wives / Said he, `I think it's much more fun / Than getting stuck with only one.' '' Several jokes fall flat on their British colloquialism: ``Hey diddle diddle / We're all on the fiddle,'' while others die of old age: ``knickers'' rhymed with ``vicar's.'' Blake, who also illustrated Dahl's Matilda , supplies messily frenzied line drawings that are far more amusing than the sophomoric verses they accompany. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Blake's jacket art for this book says it all: on a garbage can (or is it a stew pot?) from which waft images from the satirized stories within is a sign which reads ``Warning--Unsuitable for Small Readers.'' Never known for subtlety, good taste, or benevolence, Dahl is his usual disrespectful, misanthropic self in Rhyme Stew . In jaunty, often funny verse, he pokes fun at a dozen or so traditional rhymes and folktales. In ``Dick Whittington and His Cat,'' the cat convinces Dick to leave London: `` `Come home, my boy, without more fuss/ This lousy town's no place for us.' '' In ``Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,'' the action unfolds in London's Ritz Hotel to a scene of debauchery that makes the Arabian Nights seem almost chaste. Pen-and-ink drawings have the same ease to them as the verses--as if they were simply dashed off. A djinn in underpants and a naked king being fitted for invisible clothes are both particularly funny. However, it is not the raunchy longer pieces that make this a book not for children, but the shorter verses like ``A Hand in the Bird'' involving a vicar's hands in a maiden's knickers and ``Hot and Cold'' which begins: ``A woman who my mother knows/ Came in and took off all her clothes.'' Adolescents who enjoy pretty tasteless and aggressive humor will doubtless be amused by Dahl's cleverness. --Ann Stell, The Smithtown Library, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Dahl's doggerel stew has the silly vulgarity beloved of younger teenagers whose jokes have left the bathroom (most of the time) for peeks behind the bedroom door and for sniggering fantasies about teachers, vicar's wives, and bare-bottomed dancing girls: "A woman who my mother knows / Came in and took off all her clothes . . . ." Short verses alternate with long parodies of fairy tales, all exuberantly illustrated with Blake's scratchy line-drawings that show bespectacled sturdy children confronted by grotesque carryings-on. Like the verse, the drawings combine innocence and cheek, the mundane and the surreal. Dahl's humor often falls flat, straining too hard for rhyme and arch comment. But most of the banal puns will elicit groans of appreciation from teens, and, in the good pieces, the rhyme and beat are part of the witty parody. "Hansel and Gretel," comic but still a bit scary, could be read aloud as light relief from Strauss' sinister version in Trail of Stones [BKL Mr 1 90]. Perhaps in answer to his censors, Dahl points out, in rhyme, that the Brothers Grimm were gruesome and gory, and they didn't even soften it with humor: "What if," the father said, "they fell, / Quite accidentally, down the well?" / "Oh no," Mum said, "I doubt we oughta, / It might pollute the drinkin' water." Gr. 7-10. --Hazel Rochman

Horn Book Review

A collection of fifteen parodies by the noted iconoclast will never pass as a children's book. The poems are filled with unsavory situations, sniggering references to sex, and arch innuendoes, and the illustrations show pop-eyed voyeurs and smirking sexpots. Even the cover displays a sign stating, 'Warning. Unsuitable for Small Readers.' Totally inappropriate, but the poems are mighty funny. From HORN BOOK 1990, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.