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For nearly three decades, the rambunctious rhymes of Toronto poet laureate Dennis Lee have delighted Canadian kids. And
Bubblegum Delicious, his first new collection in several years, sparkles with the wit, wordplay, and sense of wonder that infuse all of Lee's poetry for children. As always, Lee has found just the right device for enticing young readers into this rich and imaginative world, here in the story of a young boy who has moved away to a new place and has had to leave his best friend behind. There are poems about remembered hiding places, a new television set, imaginative games, and questions about just what it is that makes up a friendship and what makes someone lonely. But Bubblegum Delicious is also trademark Lee, with wonderfully giddy and giggly poems that invite young readers to meet the King of Calabogie, who keeps coughing up the most remarkable things, listen to the swinging sis-boom-bang boogie-woogie rhythms of Doctor Bop, or wistfully remember a faithful jelly doughnut just waiting to be munched up in a faraway doughnut shop! There are totally gross poems like "Goober and Guck," soft, gentle verses that explore the natural world like "The Spider's Web," and the lullaby "You Too Lie Down," which closes the collection. Illustrated by the ever-madcap David McPhail, who has provided just the right images to bring Lee's poems to life,
Bubblegum Delicious is a book that young readers will return to night after night after night. (Ages 4 to 8)
--Jeffrey Canton
From Publishers Weekly
Lee and McPhail (The Ice Cream Store) return with another consistently outstanding collection of verse. Working in a range of moods, Lee serves up cheerful nonsense rhymes as well as poems that find elegance in the everyday: "You too lie/ down, the drowsy room is/ close and come to darkness./ Hush, you/ too can sleep at last. You/ too lie down." A chain of entries links the volume to the timeless authority of playground chants and Mother Goose rhymes in their recasting of childhood classics, as in "I ordered a TV-vee-vee/ To see what I could see-see-see" or "Fly me round the microwave./ Fly me round the moon./ Fly me like a millionaire/ On a Saturday afternoon!" Of note are slangy minor entries, printed in small type and worked into the illustrations (e.g., printed sideways, along the pickets of a fence; or between the branches of a leafless tree); these unfold silly surprises, including several with a mild gross-out factor and one about the Beatles. McPhail, working in his spring-like watercolor palette, unifies the poems by featuring a boy and a dog. The pair calmly coexists with the dragons or lions or wooly mammoths that make themselves at home in the art, as do a group of comically outlandish bugs. Startling readers into appreciation, the dexterity of Lee's language and of McPhail's detailed pictures guarantee discoveries on every page. Ages 5-9.
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