Title: Mother Goose: 100 Best-Loved Verses
Illustrator: Mary Engelbreit
Reading Level: Ages 4 - 8
Hardcover: 128 Pages
Publisher: Harper Collins
Despite the mysterious origins of Mother Goose, the time-honored classical rhymes have enraptured millions of children around the world for many generations. Widely popular for being silly, witty and wise, Mother Goose rhymes entertains children with their fun, rhyming songs and sometimes nonsense lyrics. Mother Goose takes the forefront when it comes to developing early literacy skills. Many libraries these days incorporate story times like "Mother Goose On the Loose" in an attempt to foster reading development in young children. Not only do these beloved rhymes strive to promote early literacy, they offer the child a truly magical experience!
Standing true to the old adage "A picture speaks a thousand words", Mary Engelbreit's version of Mother Goose sports exquisitely detailed, gorgeous medieval-style illustrations. In this compilation of One-hundred verses, she not only incorporates the much-loved classics like 'Humpty Dumpty', 'Jack and Jill', 'Hickory Dickory', 'Little Miss Muffet' and so forth, but many unfamiliar ones like 'Terrence McDiddler', 'Three Little Ghostesses', 'Little Poll Parrot' and so on. Also, I noticed some subtle variations to the rhymes, like in the "Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe". The Old Woman in this book doesn't whip them, but kisses them all soundly and sends them to bed. And, Gosh! I found a typo as well. In the rhyme "Good Morning, Mrs. Hen", the mother hen counts her chicken to be ten, but she lists them as four brown, four yellow and four speckled red chicks. If you observe carefully, you might actually find four chicks speckled red, but four and four and four don't add up to ten. It could get a little confusing for the children and I wish the editor had either corrected this typo or stuck with the original version of it.
Terrence McDiddler, the three-stringed fiddler,
Can charm, if you please, the fish from the seas.
Ickle ockle, blue bockle, Fishes in the sea,
If you want a pretty maid, Please choose me.
My daughter has many favorite mother goose rhymes from this book including "Old King Cole", "Handy Spandy", "Humpty Dumpty", "Wee Willie Winkie", "Jack and Jill". Its cute to watch her grabbing candy bars and plum cake from Handy Spandy and doling it out to her doll and stuffed animals. When I sing to her about "Little Bo-Peep" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep", she sings "Baa.. Baa.." in the background. One of her absolute favorites is the "dibby-dobbey page" (she calls rain as "dibbey dobbey" which she takes after Mr.Brown from Dr.Seuss), which has all the rhymes you might sing on a rainy day like "Dr.Foster went to Gloucester" and "Rain on the green grass". As we leaf through the pages, we also happened to discover that "Ickle Bockle" and "Three Little Ghostesses" rhymes became her new favorites. Another thing I noticed was, she kept staring at the pictures long after I had finished reciting them and she won't let me turn the page until she had a REALLY GOOD LOOK at it. Even though we own several Mother Goose books, I am delighted to find this adorable copy. One caveat though - Being really chunky, its almost impossible for a young child to sit through the entire book. You might have to read it in a few installments to actually get through it. But once you get to the end, you might want to start over all again!!
My Rating: 4.8/5
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