I Saw Esau

I can't decide which I love more about this book, the rebellious creative rhymes that stay with you all day or the beautifully compatible illustrations. Either way, this is also an old favorite that I delighted in revisiting. What a wonderful way to introduce older children to the fact that poetry

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can be "cool".

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This is a lovely little book, full of lovely little illustrations!

It's based on a collection of rhymes first put together in the 1940s in England, though, and it's quite easy to tell - the rhymes are very British, and noticeably dated. And there's nothing wrong with that, but the book markets

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itself as universal rather than situating the rhymes in their context, as if mid-20th-century British *is* the universal, which bothers me a little.

On a similar tune, the notes in the back for each rhyme are nice, but I could wish for something more extensive, as many of these rhymes have a lot of regional variations, and a lot of interesting folk etymology, behind them. And I could wish for better indexing (or, actually, any indexing at all.) That's mostly me wishing this was a different book than it is, though. What it is, is a lovely little jewel of a pocket-book.

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This hardcover, with notes, looks scholarly - and is. However, if it were presented in a cheap mm Scholastic pb, children could also appreciate it. It's actually quite fun!

No kid should be without a few choice rhymes to turn the curse away, or put the curse on, whichever seems required.

My sister gave this to many when I was smaller and I always keep it around, with my page marked just so I can read it anytime...

A collection of children's rhymes, first collected in England in 1946, including things like taunts and insults, riddles, skipping rhymes, and mocking verses about schoolwork. Most of them probably aren't exactly the sort of thing you'd find in Mother Goose.

The rhymes themselves are mildly

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interesting, sometimes vaguely amusing, and often (from the perspective of a 21st century American) entertainingly quaint-feeling in their language. There are a few brief notes on a number of them in the back -- something I wish I'd realized while I was reading through them -- but not enough to make this feel more like a work of scholarship than a collection of amusements.

It would all be diverting for a few minutes and then pretty quickly forgettable, I think, except that this edition, from 1992, also includes some delightfully offbeat (indeed, sometimes charmingly grotesque) illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

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-see the review of Opie's The Classic Fairy Tales