2013 Newbery Read Book 12 It’s highly amusing…

2013 Newbery Read, Book 12
It’s highly amusing. The poems are quite fun and I’d say 70% of them are truly clever. It bothers me so much, though, that the artwork accompanying the poems is so sub-par. There is a clear “mimicking” (poorly) in layout, design, illustration style to a really famous and thoroughly recognizable illustrator’s work. I had to cover most of the drawings to enjoy the poems themselves. I’d rather leave it to my own imagination to “picture” the scenarios presented in the poetry which is NOT hard to do because the poet is actually quite deft in making the mental image very clear. (A few poems are clearly picture-dependent for illuminating a point hidden in the text, but they are rare and I wish they hadn’t been included.) So, the pictures, to me, totally detract from the work as a whole.