The book's title is The Nonsense Show and the cover image is a yellow duck emerging from a banana peel, so the "absurd, odd, preposterous, foolish, weird, surreal" nature of Eric Carle's (The Very Hungry Caterpillar) bold foray into the world of wordplay is made plain from the start. (All those adjectives appear in a boy's cartoon bubble of "gobbledegook" on the final spread.)
"Welcome, friends!/ Don't be slow./ Step right up to/ The Nonsense Show!" A rabbit magician pulls a boy out of a hat, a trick that kicks off the topsy-turvy journey ahead, where a fish is stuck in a birdcage and a mouse leads a cat around on a leash. Sometimes the "twist" is not a standard switcheroo like the previous examples, it's just random silliness: "What a funny-looking ball/ Thought the tennis ace/ And wound up/ With applesauce/ In her face." Carle gleefully dares to rhyme "ought-er" with "water" in one poem about a rubber duck with human feet, and in one particularly pleasing spread, Mr. Up is seated up on the ceiling eating cake and Mrs. Down is seated down on the floor eating cake: "It's not a mistake,/ It's just how they eat cake."
Carle's cut-paper artwork, with its chunky shapes and vibrant colors, is the right match for the simple, absurdist scenarios. Early sketches of the final artwork populate the endpapers--from the man in a doghouse to the upside-down cake eater--one more clever design touch to reflect the freewheeling spirit of this playful ode to nonsense. --Karin Snelson, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness