Books I Love to Hate

BOOKS I LOVE TO HATE

posted by Andrea Perry

I guess I could more accurately have titled this little rant, "Celebrity Books that I Love to Hate," as it turns out all of my selections are from celebrity children's authors.  And I use the term 'author' loosely. I feel it is safe to say these books would never have been published if their creators had not had the whole celebrity thing going for them. Even more painful for me is the fact that some include poetry. (And yes I know that rhymes.)
Steve Martin let me down first with The Alphabet from A to Y.  What can I say about the letter I's couplet?
"Iggy's aunt Ida, indecent in undies,
 Hid icicles under her Indian uncle."
                      Or Z's?
"Zany Zeno zoomed to the end zone,
 But with a zucchini, scoring him zero."
Enough said?  Dean Koontz's Every Day's a Holiday prompted me to write a review on Amazon. It was that bad. To wit, an excerpt from "Snow Day," as to rewrite the entire poem is a waste of good blog space:
"...Lost deep in snow,
 And still more snow.
Froze my big toe.
 It had to go.
 I cut it off.
 I've got a cough.
 I just heard, dude,
We're out of food..."
And while we're busy gagging, here is "Abraham Lincoln's Birthday":
"Abe was born in a humble log cabin.
 He walked FIVE LONG MILES every day to school!
 I guess he was mentally unbalanced
 But the log cabin part sounds kinda cool."
I kept waiting for him somewhere along the line to rhyme "orange" and "door hinge!!" 

My final two chosen disasters are Party Animals by Kathie Lee Gifford, and Dirt on my Shirt by Jeff Foxworthy.  Dirt on My Shirt reads like a redneck lullaby, a stand up routine set to rhyme, while Kathie Lee's book comes with a CD where she sings the story to us! Help!  I am only heartened by the fact that when I questioned bookstore employess about Kathy Lee's book, I was told that almost everyone who saw it picked it up and paged through it, but then they all put it back.  Perhaps there's hope!