Raining Cats & Dogs: A Collection of Irresistible Idioms and Illustrations to Tickle the Funny Bones of Young People (review)

Does horsing around get your goat when you’re trying to bring home the bacon and keep everything shipshape? Moses’ gallery of idioms will help you explain this to confused grade-schoolers. This lively guide to colloquialism treats forty-eight figures of speech, three or four to a spread; each entry receives a brief gloss on its meaning (“Get the ball rolling” means “To get things started”) and a sentence employing the featured phrase in context, while a spirited vignette provides visual interest. The glosses are sometimes pithily apt (“Spending more money than you have! Oops!” for “In the hole”), but they’re sometimes awkward and inexact (“My cup of tea” doesn’t simply mean “One person is just right for another,” for instance). The accompanying art, sturdy, compact oils rich with concentrated personality, offer humorously literal takes on the expressions (Big Ralph’s x-rays reveals the butterflies in his stomach, and the short-funded doctors are performing surgery on an actual shoestring). Those will certainly amuse kids who’ve mastered the phrases as figures of speech, but the scenes will end up obscuring more than clarifying for youngsters still trying to sort the figurative from the literal. This is therefore more entertaining as a spin on the known than a guide to the unfamiliar, but kids who enjoy language play will appreciate the game, and it could inspire some creative language-arts projects. An index is included, and three reference works are offered as a bibliography.