Rhyme Stew - Hardcover

Quentin Blake is one of Britain's most successful illustrators. He has illustrated nearly three hundred books and he was Roald Dahl's favourite illustrator. He has won many awards including the Whitbread Award and the Kate Greenaway Medal and taught for over twenty years at the Royal College of Art. In 1999 he became the first ever Children's Laureate and in 2013 he was knighted in the New Year's Honours.

Blake's jacket art for this book says it all: on a garbage can (or is it a stew pot?) from which waft images from the satirized stories within is a sign which reads "Warning--Unsuitable for Small Readers." Never known for subtlety, good taste, or benevolence, Dahl is his usual disrespectful, misanthropic self in Rhyme Stew . In jaunty, often funny verse, he pokes fun at a dozen or so traditional rhymes and folktales. In "Dick Whittington and His Cat," the cat convinces Dick to leave London: " 'Come home, my boy, without more fuss/ This lousy town's no place for us.' " In "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," the action unfolds in London's Ritz Hotel to a scene of debauchery that makes the Arabian Nights seem almost chaste. Pen-and-ink drawings have the same ease to them as the verses--as if they were simply dashed off. A djinn in underpants and a naked king being fitted for invisible clothes are both particularly funny. However, it is not the raunchy longer pieces that make this a book not for children, but the shorter verses like "A Hand in the Bird" involving a vicar's hands in a maiden's knickers and "Hot and Cold" which begins: "A woman who my mother knows/ Came in and took off all her clothes." Adolescents who enjoy pretty tasteless and aggressive humor will doubtless be amused by Dahl's cleverness. --Ann Stell, The Smithtown Library, NY
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