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humorous books
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From: SiriWF at aol.com <SiriWF>
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 22:29:18 EDT
Hello, I've been reading for several months, and love ccbc-net, especially since I requested the digest version!
The discussion on humor in children's books was too tempting to just lurk through without adding a favorite.
With my seven-and-three-quarter-year-old son, I have been on a steady jag of reading children's books aloud on weekend mornings. We've read almost all the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary (wanting more Henry Huggins and Ribsy stories and taking a hilarious side track), the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books
(Betty MacDonald) and almost all the Moomintroll books (Tove Jansson), and discovered a new author when we were looking for more. In the "J"s, we found
"Dinosaur With an Attitude" by Hanna Johansen (Wetlands Press, Berkeley, CA).
"Dinosaur" is an odd book with the odd concept of passing on a magical name from one friend, having "put up with it for a couple of years," to another. This "Zawinul," is the book's narrator.
The dinosaur (who hatches out of the new Zawinul's overripe Easter egg) is feisty, logical and so funny, my son and I repeat favorite comsognathus comments whenever possible.
The humor of this book is in the straight-man narrator (routinely flummoxed by the cat-sized dinosaur's questions) and in the originality of the dinosaur's pesky personality and his choice of conversation topics. Needless to say, it's a thinly disguised adult/child relationship and the child has a lot of the upper hand, or at least, a lot of the laughs. "Isn't that so, Kiki?"
Siri Weber Feeney SiriWF at aol.com
(An interesting aside: "Dinosaur" is translated from its original German so expertly, I can't even imagine other phrasings or word choices. The Moomintroll books, too, are incredibly well translated from Finnish, no less.)
Received on Fri 17 May 2002 09:29:18 PM CDT
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 22:29:18 EDT
Hello, I've been reading for several months, and love ccbc-net, especially since I requested the digest version!
The discussion on humor in children's books was too tempting to just lurk through without adding a favorite.
With my seven-and-three-quarter-year-old son, I have been on a steady jag of reading children's books aloud on weekend mornings. We've read almost all the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary (wanting more Henry Huggins and Ribsy stories and taking a hilarious side track), the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books
(Betty MacDonald) and almost all the Moomintroll books (Tove Jansson), and discovered a new author when we were looking for more. In the "J"s, we found
"Dinosaur With an Attitude" by Hanna Johansen (Wetlands Press, Berkeley, CA).
"Dinosaur" is an odd book with the odd concept of passing on a magical name from one friend, having "put up with it for a couple of years," to another. This "Zawinul," is the book's narrator.
The dinosaur (who hatches out of the new Zawinul's overripe Easter egg) is feisty, logical and so funny, my son and I repeat favorite comsognathus comments whenever possible.
The humor of this book is in the straight-man narrator (routinely flummoxed by the cat-sized dinosaur's questions) and in the originality of the dinosaur's pesky personality and his choice of conversation topics. Needless to say, it's a thinly disguised adult/child relationship and the child has a lot of the upper hand, or at least, a lot of the laughs. "Isn't that so, Kiki?"
Siri Weber Feeney SiriWF at aol.com
(An interesting aside: "Dinosaur" is translated from its original German so expertly, I can't even imagine other phrasings or word choices. The Moomintroll books, too, are incredibly well translated from Finnish, no less.)
Received on Fri 17 May 2002 09:29:18 PM CDT
