The McElderry Book of Mother Goose:
Revered and Rare Rhymes
Petra Mathers. S&S/McElderry, $21.99 (96p) ISBN 978-0-689-85605-1
This fourth title in the McElderry Books series—following compilations of Greek myths, Aesop’s fables, and Grimm’s fairy tales—features more than 50 Mother Goose rhymes, illustrated in watercolor by Mathers with humor and emotional sensitivity. Joining familiar rhymes like “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” and “The Queen of Hearts” are many less-known selections, which often have somber subjects. Deaths and other injuries aren’t uncommon (“Little Betty Pringle, she had a pig./ He was not very little and not very big./ When he was alive, he lived in clover,/ But now he’s dead and that’s all over”), but they appear alongside rhymes comic, comforting, and clever to create a full, rich collection. Ages 6–10.

--Publishers Weekly, July 16, 2012, *STAR

MATHERS, Petra, comp. The McElderry Book of Mother Goose: Revered and Rare Rhymes. illus. by compiler. 80p. index. CIP. S & S/Atheneum. 2012. Tr $21.99. ISBN 978-0-689-85605-1; ebook $12.99. ISBN 978-1-4424-5314-2. LC 2011003404.
PreS-Gr 3–These 57 rhymes offer children a new and fresh perspective on the familiar world of Mother Goose. Although there are countless collections in print that offer lesser-known poems and rhymes, such as Jackie Morris’s The Cat and the Fiddle (Frances Lincoln, 2011), this one stands out because of its format and artwork. The watercolor illustrations on every page are visually stunning, and they add either appropriate humor or darkness. Among the well-known rhymes are standards like “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Hickory, Dickory, Dock,” while the more obscure poems include “Hinx, Minx, the Old Witch Winks” and “From Wibbleton to Wobbleton.” There is no table of contents, but there is a helpful index. A “Dear Reader” afterword explains why Mathers chose the poems she did. She notes that much of Mother Goose is based on true events, and that “sad things happened alongside happy ones,” thereby underscoring the importance of showing young readers realistic scenes from life as well as fantastical ones. A gem for any collection.
SLJ, October 2012

The McElderry Book
of Mother Goose: Revered and Rare Rhymes

Compiled and illustrated by Petra Mathers
(McElderry; ISBN 9780689856051; August 2012; Summer Catalog)

Not since Leonard Marcus’s Mother Goose’s Little Misfortunes (rev. 11/90) has there been such a delightfully idiosyncratic selection. Drawn mostly from the canonical Opies (see “Sources”), Mathers’s fifty-seven entries include many lesser-known or longer rhymes (some “sad and scary”), all nicely leavened with such familiar nonsense as “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Here are puzzles (“I Saw a Fishpond All on Fire”); tongue twisters and verbal nonsense (“The Great Panjandrum”); stories tragic (“poor babes in the wood”) and comic (a peddler sells a woman “the piece he’d purloined” from her own petticoat). Several are lyrical (“seventeen times as high as the moon”) or mysterious (“tell my mother I shall never come back”). Vocabulary is unstinted (counting down “Ten Little Penguins”: “One got in chancery”). The delicate wit of Mathers’s watercolors and the generous spaces where her characters appear enable creative interpretation—Cock Robin’s funeral is a cooperative venture amongst the birds; Hector Protector, “dressed all in green,” is green himself: he’s a frog. Dr. Fell’s disgruntled patient, a dog, has a bandaged foot and a plastic Elizabethan collar. Mathers’s expressive figures, in many moods, are effectively counterpointed by touches of dramatic, or pensive, landscape. Pair this with the Opie/Sendak I Saw Esau (rev. 9/92) for a feast of traditional rhymes.

--The Horn Book, Nov/Dec 2012, *STAR