Rebus riot

Bonnie Christensen, Bonnie Christensen

From School Library Journal Grade 1-4. Clever, imaginative, and hilarious rebus-sprinkled poems about friends, animals, naughty children, valentines, and other varied topics. The tiny pictures include vocabulary-builders such as shallot, puffin, squid, and tapir, as well as more familiar vegetables, animals, and other objects. The book can be read aloud, but everyone must be close enough to see the little rebuses. Solutions appear in a full-page illustration opposite each selection, and the poems are written out at the end. All this fun is set out on double-page spreads of black-and-white scratchboard images transferred to paper and painted with watercolors. Although the figures are cartoonlike in technique, the scratchboard gives a texture and solidity to the illustrations, which are full of action and humor. Cowboy fish ride seahorses, toucans rhumba to exhaustion, dustbunnies march under the bed, and every reader, adults included, can have a hearty laugh. Patricia Pearl Dole, formerly at First Presbyterian School, Martinsville, VA Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.