The Neighborhood Mother Goose
©Nina Crews 2004 Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins Publishers ISBN: 9780060515737; ISBN10: 0060515732
About The Neighborhood Mother Goose
Every day, children the world over sing, shout, and celebrate Mother Goose rhymes. And now there's a new reason to cheer: Nina Crews has added her own remarkable, jazzy style of illustration to a collection of forty-one favorite verses.
Whether it's Jack jumping over a candlestick (atop a cupcake), Georgie Porgie kissing the girls (at the playground), or a fine lady riding a white horse (on the carousel), this exuberant treasury is sure to be read and enjoyed over and over again.
Reviews
- ALA Notable Book 2005
- Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts (NCTE)
- Texas Library Association 2x2 Reading List 2005
- New York Public Library 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2004
- CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Council) Choice 2004
- Capitol Choices Noteworthy Books for Children
- School Library Journal Best Books 2004
- Kirkus Reviews 2004 Editor’s Choice List
- Parenting Magazine Books of the Year 2004
- Cuyahoga County Public Library Children’s Books to Read and Own
Nina Crews' clear, beautiful color photographs and computer manipulations bring children close-up to people like them. In this modern Mother Goose, she uses computer tools to combine photos of joyful kids in her Brooklyn neighborhood with all kinds of scenarios, realistic and wild. In "Hey diddle diddle!" a brooding cat holding a violin watches a boy running on the sidewalk, while a silver spoon looms over a wooden fence and a cow walks in the air above a full moon. In contrast, the illustration for "Pat-a-cake" is homey and real: two girls clap hands in front of a bakery window. The child's sense of being small in a world of giants is beautifully captured in the double-page spread of tiny kids jumping in a giant shoe. Realism, of course, has never been part of the Mother Goose nonsense drama, but preschoolers will enjoy seeing kids like themselves in pictures that make the familiar rhymes part of imaginative fun on the city sidewalk, where girls and boys come out to ride their scooters and bikes, play ball, and dream. – Hazel Rochman, Booklist, December 1, 2004
Crews connects 41 nursery rhymes to full spread, skillfully manipulated photo-collages depicting a multi-age cast of marvelously expressive children at play in various sunny, well-kept Brooklyn locales. Her visualizations are, by and large, literal: an outsized dish and spoon peer over a tall fence between brownstones, ignoring the airborne cow in the background: an itsy bitsy spider does double duty, climbing up a drain spout and frightening a brown-skinned Miss Muffet: a thumb-sized little old lady laughingly scolds 15 even tinier children as they clamber over a pair of shoes left on a carpeted stairway. Opening and closing with rooftop view of Brooklyn (look for the goose), this gathering of common and not-so-common rhymes will be a bit with young readers and pre-readers in any setting, urban or otherwise. - Kirkus, January 1, 2004
No quaint little woman in a tall hat here! This "Mother Goose" is a real goose that lives in a city park. The 41 rhymes range from the most familiar ("Pat-a-cake," "The itsy-bitsy spider") to a few that may be new to readers. Crews sets the verses in an urban environment full of city sidewalks, fire escapes, and brownstones. The pages are peopled with modern-looking, jeans- and T-shirt-clad youngsters of a variety of ages and backgrounds, as well as several adults. It is the smart, digitally manipulated photographic compositions that give this book its snap. They capture a child's real world, animated by contemporary visual references. A saucy little girl with a curl is busily taking scissors to her Barbie's hair, and a helmeted kid rides a razor scooter in the street. Some pictures have been manipulated to be humorously surreal. The grinning lad photographed in "To market, to market" is carrying a grocery bag with a real piglet in it, while the old woman who lived in a shoe is raising her brood in a pair of well-worn men's boots carelessly tossed on the stairs. This offering is a fresh and welcome contribution that will have broader appeal than the standard nursery rhyme fare, which often seems limited to the pre-school set. A truly cool version that is not for babies only. - Kate McClelland School Library Journal, January 2004