Rhett Miller

This book is horribly, hilariously irreverent. (It made me laugh out loud.) But it's funny because it's true to life. It touches on themes that are sometimes profound- like how kids see their parents vs. how the world sees their parents. It also highlights very real experiences of children, like being afraid to go to the bathroom in the night, sibling jealousy or frustration, and begging parents for a dog.

This. Book. Is. Hilarious! I laughed out loud on the first page and it just kept getting better. These poems are irreverent, goofy, and relatable. They deal with experiences we're all intimately familiar with, from using your shoe to flush the toilet to desperately blaming everyone for why your homework is missing when it turns out you didn't have any (not that I'm intimately familiar with that one, obviously). My favorite poem is "My Twin," which breaks the rhythm and the rhyme scheme show more repeatedly in ways that only get funnier. I can't wait to read it to a class. Dan Santat's zany and colorful illustrations are the perfect fit for these off-the-wall poems. I will be buying this for my library as soon as I get the green light. show less

The illustrations are wonderful; the poems, amusing, although fans of the Old 97's may regret that they don't exhibit the same level of cleverness and characterization that the author brings to his song lyrics. (You can write for kids without dumbing down.) All in all, this seems to be a project done more for the dad's amusement than for the amusement of kids in general.

This poetry book brings poetry to another level by providing colorful and eye-catching illustrations in addition to poems that take everyday subjects, such as homework and sports, and make them funny and relatable for young readers. I specifically liked the quick verses present in most of the poems within this text, as they took humorous topics (like nose hairs and annoying brothers) and talked about them in poems that read more like songs than informational poetry lines. Overall, I found show more this poetry book to be interactive and interesting, and that it would be a perfect read-aloud book for parents to read to their children or for teachers to read to their students. Each poem is its own in the sense that they individually take on topics that are only present on a page or two, which helps to add a nice variety of varying poems to appeal to a wide range of readers. I believe that the main message/purpose of this book was to showcase to readers hilarious topics through poems, which are not very popular and thus not very present in books in classrooms or home libraries. In addition, the author of this text demonstrated to young writers that any topic can be written about through any technique, and especially within poems. In all, I really enjoyed reading this book and I look forward to including it in my classroom library. show less