Yummy: Eating through the Day by Lee Bennett Hopkins (Editor), Renee Flower (Illustrator)

From the Publisher

What's YUMMY?

Everything from the smell of cinnamon buns baking at breakfast to a delicious pasta dinner with a sunset-colored mango for dessert. Join a wild and wacky family as they celebrate the wide variety of foods on today's menu. In Renée Flower's playful illustrations, a boy struggles to pry open his giant cereal box, a girl hides in a bag of potato chips, and even the parents have fun with the idea of table manners.

Lee Bennett Hopkins weaves new voices together with those of beloved poets like Tony Johnston and David McCord for an anthology that rolls easily off the tongue. So open these pages and enjoy the exuberant spirit and tasty selections within.

Publishers Weekly

Like School Supplies, also by Hopkins and Flowers, this collection of poems centers on a single topic: food. This time, however, the match between art and text seems more frenetic than fitting. Served up under the headings of Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Dessert (plus one Snack), this playful assortment from both well-known and new poets focuses on the sensation and delight of eating common foods. Tom Robert Shields, for example, celebrates an orange in a poem that begins, "Perfect morning roundness/ Color from the sun." In a lighter key, David McCord writes, "Eggplant has a lovely color./ As food, though, how could anything be duller?" But the forced hilarity of the loudly colored, geometric illustrations competes for attention with the more gently amusing or contemplative poems. For younger children especially, Flower's blaring, outsize fruit and veggies may simply be confusing. Mangoes as big as watermelons, spaghetti the size of garden hoses and cutlery like gladiator weapons are all tumbled together, most with grinning faces (even the potato chips and Jell-O cubes smile like Miss America contestants). Considering the pleasure the poets take in describing food, it's odd that the visual images are so stylized and cerebral; there's nothing in the art to make the mouth water. Ages 4-up. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Children's Literature

Tantalizing selections will tickle your taste buds and your spirits in this lively anthology. The morning smells of bacon and cinnamon buns whet our appetite in Karen O'Donnell Taylor's poem. Free verse poems spotlight the tropical pleasure of oranges, the cheesy goo of macaroni, and the stubbornness of ketchup bottles. In an onomatopoetic piece by Rebecca Kai Dotlich, colorful JellO wiggles, waggles and quakes us into a smile. Excerpts from David McCord's "Pease Porridge Poems" allow us to examine the ups and downs of eggplant. We witness a "peagreen fright" when Lee Bennet Hopkins' peas bounce off the page in wideeyed wonder. We are even given instructions about the best way to eat a sandwich cookie and the "boring," but allimportant "no burping, no slurping" rules at the dinner table. Kids of all ages will delight in the multicultural menu and popoffthepage paintings. 2000, Simon & Schuster, Ages 4 up, $17.00. Reviewer: Leslie Julian

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3-Hopkins clearly has an affinity for poems about food. As in Munching (Little, Brown, 1985; o.p.), he has assembled a group of new and previously published poems that celebrate the glories of eating. Flower's brilliant colored-pencil, watercolor, and gouache paintings enliven each page, extending the edible pleasure extolled in each selection. Whether evoking "Morning Smells" ("Cinnamon buns are baking,/mingling with the smell/of sharp, strong coffee-") or the joy of eating a snack ("A pro/Makes a sandwich cookie/Last-/Knows the art/Of getting to the cookie's/Heart-"), Hopkins's mastery of the art of creating a delectable anthology is quite clear. A book to be savored in many delicious bites.-Kathleen Whalin, Greenwich Country Day School, CT Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A whimsical kaleidoscope of watercolor and gouache illustrations whets the appetite of voracious children eating their way through breakfast, lunch, snacks, dinner, and dessert in 16 delectable, poetic menu choices. The table of contents labeled "Today's Menu" serves every kid's favorites—aromatic, baked cinnamon buns, macaroni and cheese, wiggly Jell-o, crispy potato chips, and sandwich cookies. Table manners, though listed, are quickly dismissed as boring. "Mango" will induce juice to drip down your chin and "Pasta Perfect" will clarify all of those different pastas and their uses. The artist's note describes for a child's benefit how the illustrations were conceived and produced (a mixture of painting and various ways of creating textures). Together, the poetry and illustrations fit tightly, like a sandwich cookie—meant for each other and yummy to the core! (Picture book. 4-6)

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