World Rat Day: Poems about Real Holidays You've Never Heard Of by J. Patrick Lewis (review)

Twenty-six poems celebrate twenty-two weird holidays (Limerick Day is represented with a collection of five poems), most featuring animals, in brief and whimsical verses. Topics include Dragon Appreciation Day ("Eight Table Manners for Dragons"), Worm Day ("What the Worm Knows"), and International Cephalopod Awareness Day ("What Are the Cephalop-Odds?"), among others, with each holiday's date displayed along with its name. The best entries are witty as well as silly, using form to emphasize their joke: "Bats" offers clever imagery ("Black sacks in the morning/ Airmailed at night"), "A Flamingo" is a streamlined concrete poem, "Said the Frog" provides a deliciously goofy pile of rhyme ("I was really in a muddle/ looking over a mud puddle/ 'cause I didn't have a paddle"). Some poems are less successful, though, with scansion problems and strained wordplay; there's also no history or source given for the holidays, which require quite the generous interpretation of "real" (Happy Mew Year for Cats Day and Yell "Fudge" at the Cobras in North America Day are both novelty days created for calendar amusement). The illustrations, ink wash with drawings assembled digitally, have the translucency of watercolors and the crispness of computer art; the busy compositions are sometimes a little unfocused, but the absurd and playful touches make them appealing and suitable partners for the text. Unofficial as the holidays may be, they'll provide plenty of curricular occasions and some goofy reading aloud, and kids may leap on the notion of creating and celebrating their own invented holidays. A table of contents (which includes both the holidays celebrated and the poem titles) is included.