It is so hard to wrap my heard around this being a banned book. The authors collected children’s sing songs and rhymes, and their variations across the US, put them in a book. They talk about how and why these songs vary the meaning behind some of them. It is full American childhood folklore. I grew up with my dad singing these songs. They always made me smile but I never knew how much of a cultural phenomenon they were. They are largely gone today. Most children do not know these, and they are not passed down like they were. I love that not only do I have the memory of these rhymes and singsongs, but that someone took the time to collect them and write about them before they are gone forever. So, pull up a bucket of mutilated monkey meat, and enjoy this history of gross songs from childhood. ( )

Fun! It makes me want to contact the authors and give them my variants - there are several that I know in quite different forms than any of their collected variants. In one case, their endnote mentions that this was the only version with a particular reference - but mine has the same (Miss Lucy with a tugboat). The only thing is, I wish they'd done footnotes instead of endnotes. I'm interested in their comments, particularly overviews of the general trends they saw - but it's such a chunk of text at the back, and it's rather difficult to skip back and forth to see what the endnote is referring to. It would have been easier if there were footnotes on the same page as their references. Or at least endnotes on each chapter. Still - a lot of fun to read, both the rhymes and the comments by informants. I want to reread this, and I want to show it to others and get their reactions. As I said - fun! ( )