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Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups
My Head Has a Bellyache: And More Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups
This hilarious follow-up to the New York Times bestselling poetry book I'm Just No Good at Rhyming is full of surprising twists of wit and wordplay that will have readers rolling on the floor laughing!
“Highly recommended, it gets 5 stars and 8 moons and a chef's kiss and a tip of the hat and a jump in the lake from me.”—Bob Odenkirk, award-winning actor, writer, and comedian
I'm Just No Good at Rhyming is this century's most acclaimed comedic poetry collection so far, described as "a worthy heir to Silverstein, Seuss, and even Ogden Nash" (PublishersWeekly), "wildly imaginative...inspired and inspiring" (Kirkus), and as "everything a book for kids should be" (B.J. Novak). Now, Chris Harris delivers all that and more with dazzling new heights of creativity, kooky conundrums, witty wordsmithing, and of course, wacky laugh-out-loud fun!
There's a whole new cast of characters to meet, from the Nail-Clipping Fairy (who delivers teeth at night), to Orloc the Destroyer (who can be defeated only by his mommy), to the Elderly Caveman (who complains about the younger generation obsessed with playing with fire). There are more mind-bending verbal and visual riddles, plus there's plenty of hilarious hijinks hiding around every corner, whether it's a buffalo that escapes one poem and roams through others or a meteor threatening to land on the book and obliterate everything. There's even a mini book-within-a-book! In between it all, cartoonist Andrea Tsurumi’s diverse range of exuberant people, creatures, and anthropomorphic objects ripple through the pages with playful energy.
If your head has a bellyache as you read this book, it will only be because you're laughing WAY. TOO. HARD!
“Highly recommended, it gets 5 stars and 8 moons and a chef's kiss and a tip of the hat and a jump in the lake from me.”—Bob Odenkirk, award-winning actor, writer, and comedian
I'm Just No Good at Rhyming is this century's most acclaimed comedic poetry collection so far, described as "a worthy heir to Silverstein, Seuss, and even Ogden Nash" (PublishersWeekly), "wildly imaginative...inspired and inspiring" (Kirkus), and as "everything a book for kids should be" (B.J. Novak). Now, Chris Harris delivers all that and more with dazzling new heights of creativity, kooky conundrums, witty wordsmithing, and of course, wacky laugh-out-loud fun!
There's a whole new cast of characters to meet, from the Nail-Clipping Fairy (who delivers teeth at night), to Orloc the Destroyer (who can be defeated only by his mommy), to the Elderly Caveman (who complains about the younger generation obsessed with playing with fire). There are more mind-bending verbal and visual riddles, plus there's plenty of hilarious hijinks hiding around every corner, whether it's a buffalo that escapes one poem and roams through others or a meteor threatening to land on the book and obliterate everything. There's even a mini book-within-a-book! In between it all, cartoonist Andrea Tsurumi’s diverse range of exuberant people, creatures, and anthropomorphic objects ripple through the pages with playful energy.
If your head has a bellyache as you read this book, it will only be because you're laughing WAY. TOO. HARD!
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Published July 18, 2023
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August 15, 2023
Better than Shel Silverstein.
A bold statement. Unprovable too. Strictly a matter of personal opinion. And, considering the fact that my generation was raised on a healthy diet of Silverstein (with just a smattering of Jack Prelutsky as a palate cleanser) one might even go so far as to call it a dangerous opinion. After all, by even stating that the Chris Harris collection of poetry My Head Has a Bellyache is better than, say, Where the Sidewalk Ends I am setting up some kind of cross-generational rivalry, and pre-prejudicing parents everywhere against a book that is not simply one of the best books for kids of the year, but one of the greatest poetry collections for kids ever written. I mean, we’re talking Ogden Nash/Dorothy Parker levels of greatness here, people. But to say that it’s better than Silverstein? A bad idea. Unless, of course, I can explain to you precisely why this book is better than any by the guy who made “Hug-o-War” (love you, Shel, but what the heck were you doing with that poem?!?). Folks, I see the challenge before me and I raise you one Chris Harris and one Andrea Tsurumi. A literary power duo the like of which the world of literature for kids has never seen.
96 poems sounds like a lot of poems, I know. So don't worry. There are actually more like 95 poems in the collection My Head Has a Bellyache. A wild array of different types and styles, jokes and gaffs, this book has it all. There are haiku limericks, "haiku limerick"/"limerick haiku" limericks, and (naturally) "'haiku limerick'/'limerick haiku' limerick" villanelles. There are poems with titles like "Okay, Listen Up, I'm Not Going to Eat Any Broccoli Tonight, But Don't Freak Out. It's Okay. I Already Have a Very, Very Healthy Diet. Let Me Explain Why" and poems with titles like "Pants". In the course of your reading, snakes will escape (or be set free). A meteor will destroy at least one poem in this book. A mosquito? It will die and no one will be sad. In short, you don't quite know what's going to happen in this collection. You can only know that it's going to be amazing and that kids are going to freakin' love it.
When Chris Harris wrote his previous funny collection of poetry for kids called I’m Just No Good at Rhyming it was good but it did contain the occasional misstep. There was some fatphobia and the percentage of hilarious to mildly amusing poems was decent if not extraordinary. It felt, quite frankly, like a warm up act. Harris was beginning to flex his muscles but he had a little way to go. Bellyache, in contrast, is a homecoming, but one with mysterious origins. Trying to figure out how a writer comes up with a series of funny poems feels a bit like dissecting a frog. Plus, if I’m going to be totally honest here, I have absolutely no idea how someone goes about it. I hesitate to say that a person must be intrinsically gifted but, well, let me just write one of Harris's poems out right here. It’s not one of the gut-busters, mind you, just a really excellent example of how to write a good, sweet, short little poem that works and is like no other I’ve seen before. This is “The Cure for Everything”: “No pill, no shot, no vitamin, / No potion, no inoculate, / Can make me feel as right again… / …As one good piece of chocolate.” There's an art to that.
Writing a book of funny poems for kids is no easy task. But apparently Harris wasn’t feeling like he was making this job hard enough for himself. Perhaps he sat in front of a roaring fire one day and said to himself, “Funny is good. Now how can I crank the difficulty level on this book up to 11? I know! I’ll make some of the poems honestly heartwarming too!” And this is where Harris gets the edge over the aforementioned Silverstein. Humor requires one set of muscles, emotional connection another. And for whatever reason, Harris is particularly good at both. Perhaps a bit more skilled in the funny bone department, but when I read a poem like “Watch Out, World!” I can’t help but feel the strings on my heart get tugged. Harris is at his best when he’s talking about relationships, particularly between kids and their adults. There aren’t too many such poems in this book, and one might wonder why there are any in here at all. To this, I am going to give Shel Silverstein a great deal of credit. For all that I’m dumping on him today, the man was brilliant and was very much the poet who established the form for all funny poetry collections for kids to come. Include only silliness without a touch of heart and you risk producing a book that can be written off as mere ephemera. Little better than one of those National Geographic joke books. Too much heart and you’ll have the kids snoring in the aisles. The ratio, therefore, has to be there and it has to be just right. Example A: This book.
I think few people who challenge the statement that funny books fare poorly when it comes to winning major literary awards. I once asked preeminent funny author Jon Scieszka (who has won a fair number of such awards himself) why he thought this was and he postulated a fairly good theory. If you read a book about a dead dog then most readers are going to feel sad. We share the same emotion. But if someone writes a book with jokes or funny things in it, that’s a different beast entirely. Everyone has a different sense of humor. What I find hilarious you might find disgusting and another person might find only mildly droll. Such different variegated opinions mean that it’s much harder for a committee to reach a quorum on a funny book than a sad one. A bit unfair, but that’s the way it falls out in all forms of entertainment-related awards, whether we’re talking the Oscars or the National Book Awards (QUICK! Name the last laugh-out-loud National Book Award winner!). This is a bit on the unfair side when we consider books like My Head Has a Bellyache. I personally believe that this is one best-written children’s books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. That mix of jokes that continually land and do new things I’ve never seen before combined with honest-to-goodness heart? How can I adequately convey to you how difficult that magic combo is to write?
For that matter, major awards for works of children’s literature are not handed out on a sliding scale of difficulty, but wouldn’t it be kind of neat if they were? It’s always sort of struck me as unfair that there are some books out there where the authors spent literal years in research and/or working out the finer details of a title that are indistinguishable (from a marketing standpoint anyway) from the books where someone just sort of dashed off an idea in their spare time without a second thought. And I can say with certainty that there really isn’t any award for books for kids that celebrates this level of work. Mind you, just because buckets of blood, sweat, and tears are poured into a book, that’s no guarantee that it’s actually going to be any good in the end. In the case of Mr. Harris, one would not normally ascribe a collection of poetry in the same breath as, say, a work of nonfiction that involved years’ worth of original research. Not normally, that is, until you drill down into what he’s done here. And what has he done?
So, first and foremost, there are the poems themselves. Then there are the poems that refer to one another throughout the book (the stray buffalo, the snakes that are standing in for the letter “s”, etc.). Then there are the page numbers, almost every single one of which is a joke or point of brilliance (example: for page 124 it says after the number, “The First Four Digits, If “3” Has Been Cut”). Then there's the section on “What Happened to Everyone In This Book” that refers back to fourteen poems, concluding their characters’ stories, AND it all rhymes. Then the Glossary of Terms which, you guessed it, friggin’ rhymes. Are we done? We are not done because then you get the Index by Title (which contains a lot of jokes of its own) and then the Index by Subject (personal favorite faux inclusion is, “Dancing angry bears who are brothers: Not in the book, but wow, that would be cool.”). The sheer number of gags there are breath-taking, but we are NOT done because on the very last page are “Books By Chris Harris and Andrea Tsurumi,” “Books By Chris Harris, But Not By Andrea Tsurumi”, “Books By Andrea Tsurumi But Not By Chris Harris (Partial List)”, “Books By Neither Chris Harris Nor Andrea Tsurumi (Partial List)”, and finally “Non-Books By Neither Chris Harris Nor Andrea Tsurumi (Partial List)” which contains, amongst other things, “Belgium”.
All that and have I even once mentioned the art of Andrea Tsurumi in all this? I have not! And this is a crying shame because Tsurumi turns out to be a perfect match for this text. In his previous book I’m Just No Good at Rhyming, Harris was paired with Lane Smith. This was a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Smith is one of our rare illustrators that manage to be considered both high art and capable of genre-bending hilarity. Pairing him with Harris lent Harris’s book a patina of class to those folks that remember that Stinky Cheese Man one of the classics. That said, it wasn’t a perfect pairing. Smith, for good or for ill, will always be most closely associated with the aforementioned Jon Scieszka. So it was important in this second book for Harris to create his own Smith/Scieszka partnership. Preferably with an illustrator who’s established but not yet (YET) a household name. I literally cannot think of a single artist who could have been a better fit than Andrea Tsurumi. Tsurumi (they/them) made their debut with the singularly mind-blowing picture book Accident but didn’t start getting enough deserved attention until they paired with Jarrett Dapier on Mr. Watson’s Chickens. If I were to describe their style, I’d probably go with something like “Peak Chaotic Control.” Things are forever getting out of hand in a true Tsurumi title but somehow they’re able to make you feel safe at the same time. Like the reader is sitting in the eye of the storm while the world explodes around them. And nowhere is this better put to the test than in My Head Has a Bellyache.
We cannot know how Chris Harris chooses to present his poems to his artistic collaborators. Does he offer illustration notes? Typography suggestions? Design nudges? What we do know is that as with some of the best books for kids, the words and the images in this book work in perfect tandem with one another. Printed in just black and green (as any librarian will tell you, kids will avoid pure black and white books like the plague but don’t object to single-color illustrated titles) Tsurumi doesn’t just have to match the words Harris is presenting here but the tone as well. That means that for a poem like “I Couldn’t Decide Which Version of This Poem I Liked More, So Here Are Both of Them” they can create clocks with legs bashing into one another in a cacophony of madness but then for a poem like “You, Me, a Canoe, and All Sunday”, they must shift to a simpler, quiet, even evocative nature scene. Done incorrectly the reader would experience a bit of a shock. Fortunately both Tsurumi’s art and whosoever chose the order of the poems in this book (which is an art in and of itself) are capable to making such transitions with seeming effortlessness. Andrea Tsurumi’s art is like a duck. Up above, they make it look easy. Down below, they’re paddling for all they’re worth!
After I finish writing this review I’ll put it on my blog (A Fuse #8 Production), on Goodreads, and on Amazon (not necessarily in that order). And inevitably (probably on Goodreads) maybe tomorrow, maybe 10 years from now, someone will come along and write something along the lines of, “You wrote more words in your review than there are in the book!” But in this particular case I’m not actually certain that that’s true. If you are afraid of words, particularly those of the clever variety, this is not the book for you. Harris loves wordplay. Tsurumi loves to complement those words with hilarious madcap art. Put the two together and you’ve got yourself a powerhouse combination.
Said it once.
Said it twice.
Better than Shel Silverstein.
A bold statement. Unprovable too. Strictly a matter of personal opinion. And, considering the fact that my generation was raised on a healthy diet of Silverstein (with just a smattering of Jack Prelutsky as a palate cleanser) one might even go so far as to call it a dangerous opinion. After all, by even stating that the Chris Harris collection of poetry My Head Has a Bellyache is better than, say, Where the Sidewalk Ends I am setting up some kind of cross-generational rivalry, and pre-prejudicing parents everywhere against a book that is not simply one of the best books for kids of the year, but one of the greatest poetry collections for kids ever written. I mean, we’re talking Ogden Nash/Dorothy Parker levels of greatness here, people. But to say that it’s better than Silverstein? A bad idea. Unless, of course, I can explain to you precisely why this book is better than any by the guy who made “Hug-o-War” (love you, Shel, but what the heck were you doing with that poem?!?). Folks, I see the challenge before me and I raise you one Chris Harris and one Andrea Tsurumi. A literary power duo the like of which the world of literature for kids has never seen.
96 poems sounds like a lot of poems, I know. So don't worry. There are actually more like 95 poems in the collection My Head Has a Bellyache. A wild array of different types and styles, jokes and gaffs, this book has it all. There are haiku limericks, "haiku limerick"/"limerick haiku" limericks, and (naturally) "'haiku limerick'/'limerick haiku' limerick" villanelles. There are poems with titles like "Okay, Listen Up, I'm Not Going to Eat Any Broccoli Tonight, But Don't Freak Out. It's Okay. I Already Have a Very, Very Healthy Diet. Let Me Explain Why" and poems with titles like "Pants". In the course of your reading, snakes will escape (or be set free). A meteor will destroy at least one poem in this book. A mosquito? It will die and no one will be sad. In short, you don't quite know what's going to happen in this collection. You can only know that it's going to be amazing and that kids are going to freakin' love it.
When Chris Harris wrote his previous funny collection of poetry for kids called I’m Just No Good at Rhyming it was good but it did contain the occasional misstep. There was some fatphobia and the percentage of hilarious to mildly amusing poems was decent if not extraordinary. It felt, quite frankly, like a warm up act. Harris was beginning to flex his muscles but he had a little way to go. Bellyache, in contrast, is a homecoming, but one with mysterious origins. Trying to figure out how a writer comes up with a series of funny poems feels a bit like dissecting a frog. Plus, if I’m going to be totally honest here, I have absolutely no idea how someone goes about it. I hesitate to say that a person must be intrinsically gifted but, well, let me just write one of Harris's poems out right here. It’s not one of the gut-busters, mind you, just a really excellent example of how to write a good, sweet, short little poem that works and is like no other I’ve seen before. This is “The Cure for Everything”: “No pill, no shot, no vitamin, / No potion, no inoculate, / Can make me feel as right again… / …As one good piece of chocolate.” There's an art to that.
Writing a book of funny poems for kids is no easy task. But apparently Harris wasn’t feeling like he was making this job hard enough for himself. Perhaps he sat in front of a roaring fire one day and said to himself, “Funny is good. Now how can I crank the difficulty level on this book up to 11? I know! I’ll make some of the poems honestly heartwarming too!” And this is where Harris gets the edge over the aforementioned Silverstein. Humor requires one set of muscles, emotional connection another. And for whatever reason, Harris is particularly good at both. Perhaps a bit more skilled in the funny bone department, but when I read a poem like “Watch Out, World!” I can’t help but feel the strings on my heart get tugged. Harris is at his best when he’s talking about relationships, particularly between kids and their adults. There aren’t too many such poems in this book, and one might wonder why there are any in here at all. To this, I am going to give Shel Silverstein a great deal of credit. For all that I’m dumping on him today, the man was brilliant and was very much the poet who established the form for all funny poetry collections for kids to come. Include only silliness without a touch of heart and you risk producing a book that can be written off as mere ephemera. Little better than one of those National Geographic joke books. Too much heart and you’ll have the kids snoring in the aisles. The ratio, therefore, has to be there and it has to be just right. Example A: This book.
I think few people who challenge the statement that funny books fare poorly when it comes to winning major literary awards. I once asked preeminent funny author Jon Scieszka (who has won a fair number of such awards himself) why he thought this was and he postulated a fairly good theory. If you read a book about a dead dog then most readers are going to feel sad. We share the same emotion. But if someone writes a book with jokes or funny things in it, that’s a different beast entirely. Everyone has a different sense of humor. What I find hilarious you might find disgusting and another person might find only mildly droll. Such different variegated opinions mean that it’s much harder for a committee to reach a quorum on a funny book than a sad one. A bit unfair, but that’s the way it falls out in all forms of entertainment-related awards, whether we’re talking the Oscars or the National Book Awards (QUICK! Name the last laugh-out-loud National Book Award winner!). This is a bit on the unfair side when we consider books like My Head Has a Bellyache. I personally believe that this is one best-written children’s books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. That mix of jokes that continually land and do new things I’ve never seen before combined with honest-to-goodness heart? How can I adequately convey to you how difficult that magic combo is to write?
For that matter, major awards for works of children’s literature are not handed out on a sliding scale of difficulty, but wouldn’t it be kind of neat if they were? It’s always sort of struck me as unfair that there are some books out there where the authors spent literal years in research and/or working out the finer details of a title that are indistinguishable (from a marketing standpoint anyway) from the books where someone just sort of dashed off an idea in their spare time without a second thought. And I can say with certainty that there really isn’t any award for books for kids that celebrates this level of work. Mind you, just because buckets of blood, sweat, and tears are poured into a book, that’s no guarantee that it’s actually going to be any good in the end. In the case of Mr. Harris, one would not normally ascribe a collection of poetry in the same breath as, say, a work of nonfiction that involved years’ worth of original research. Not normally, that is, until you drill down into what he’s done here. And what has he done?
So, first and foremost, there are the poems themselves. Then there are the poems that refer to one another throughout the book (the stray buffalo, the snakes that are standing in for the letter “s”, etc.). Then there are the page numbers, almost every single one of which is a joke or point of brilliance (example: for page 124 it says after the number, “The First Four Digits, If “3” Has Been Cut”). Then there's the section on “What Happened to Everyone In This Book” that refers back to fourteen poems, concluding their characters’ stories, AND it all rhymes. Then the Glossary of Terms which, you guessed it, friggin’ rhymes. Are we done? We are not done because then you get the Index by Title (which contains a lot of jokes of its own) and then the Index by Subject (personal favorite faux inclusion is, “Dancing angry bears who are brothers: Not in the book, but wow, that would be cool.”). The sheer number of gags there are breath-taking, but we are NOT done because on the very last page are “Books By Chris Harris and Andrea Tsurumi,” “Books By Chris Harris, But Not By Andrea Tsurumi”, “Books By Andrea Tsurumi But Not By Chris Harris (Partial List)”, “Books By Neither Chris Harris Nor Andrea Tsurumi (Partial List)”, and finally “Non-Books By Neither Chris Harris Nor Andrea Tsurumi (Partial List)” which contains, amongst other things, “Belgium”.
All that and have I even once mentioned the art of Andrea Tsurumi in all this? I have not! And this is a crying shame because Tsurumi turns out to be a perfect match for this text. In his previous book I’m Just No Good at Rhyming, Harris was paired with Lane Smith. This was a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Smith is one of our rare illustrators that manage to be considered both high art and capable of genre-bending hilarity. Pairing him with Harris lent Harris’s book a patina of class to those folks that remember that Stinky Cheese Man one of the classics. That said, it wasn’t a perfect pairing. Smith, for good or for ill, will always be most closely associated with the aforementioned Jon Scieszka. So it was important in this second book for Harris to create his own Smith/Scieszka partnership. Preferably with an illustrator who’s established but not yet (YET) a household name. I literally cannot think of a single artist who could have been a better fit than Andrea Tsurumi. Tsurumi (they/them) made their debut with the singularly mind-blowing picture book Accident but didn’t start getting enough deserved attention until they paired with Jarrett Dapier on Mr. Watson’s Chickens. If I were to describe their style, I’d probably go with something like “Peak Chaotic Control.” Things are forever getting out of hand in a true Tsurumi title but somehow they’re able to make you feel safe at the same time. Like the reader is sitting in the eye of the storm while the world explodes around them. And nowhere is this better put to the test than in My Head Has a Bellyache.
We cannot know how Chris Harris chooses to present his poems to his artistic collaborators. Does he offer illustration notes? Typography suggestions? Design nudges? What we do know is that as with some of the best books for kids, the words and the images in this book work in perfect tandem with one another. Printed in just black and green (as any librarian will tell you, kids will avoid pure black and white books like the plague but don’t object to single-color illustrated titles) Tsurumi doesn’t just have to match the words Harris is presenting here but the tone as well. That means that for a poem like “I Couldn’t Decide Which Version of This Poem I Liked More, So Here Are Both of Them” they can create clocks with legs bashing into one another in a cacophony of madness but then for a poem like “You, Me, a Canoe, and All Sunday”, they must shift to a simpler, quiet, even evocative nature scene. Done incorrectly the reader would experience a bit of a shock. Fortunately both Tsurumi’s art and whosoever chose the order of the poems in this book (which is an art in and of itself) are capable to making such transitions with seeming effortlessness. Andrea Tsurumi’s art is like a duck. Up above, they make it look easy. Down below, they’re paddling for all they’re worth!
After I finish writing this review I’ll put it on my blog (A Fuse #8 Production), on Goodreads, and on Amazon (not necessarily in that order). And inevitably (probably on Goodreads) maybe tomorrow, maybe 10 years from now, someone will come along and write something along the lines of, “You wrote more words in your review than there are in the book!” But in this particular case I’m not actually certain that that’s true. If you are afraid of words, particularly those of the clever variety, this is not the book for you. Harris loves wordplay. Tsurumi loves to complement those words with hilarious madcap art. Put the two together and you’ve got yourself a powerhouse combination.
Said it once.
Said it twice.
Better than Shel Silverstein.
May 26, 2023
Fun! Fun! Fun!
My Head has a Bellyache is an amusing, funny, punny, flippant, rhyming, nonsensical, entertaining read. It’s the perfect book to take on a long road trip to fill the ride with silliness and laughter!
I’ll be the first to admit, even though this is intended for children, I enjoyed every minute of it! I mean, we are all kids at heart, aren’t we? The creative, ridiculous story-poems bring many chuckles, smiles, and eye rolls, and who doesn’t need a bit of mindless entertainment in their busy lives?
I recommend this exciting book for anyone of any age who has a sense of humor, but especially for those who embrace their inner child or have children of their own.
First Line: World, watch out!
Genre: Children
Author: Chris Harris
Page Count: 192
Reading Age: 6+
#CoverLoverBookReview received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions are 100% mine.
My Head has a Bellyache is an amusing, funny, punny, flippant, rhyming, nonsensical, entertaining read. It’s the perfect book to take on a long road trip to fill the ride with silliness and laughter!
I’ll be the first to admit, even though this is intended for children, I enjoyed every minute of it! I mean, we are all kids at heart, aren’t we? The creative, ridiculous story-poems bring many chuckles, smiles, and eye rolls, and who doesn’t need a bit of mindless entertainment in their busy lives?
I recommend this exciting book for anyone of any age who has a sense of humor, but especially for those who embrace their inner child or have children of their own.
First Line: World, watch out!
Genre: Children
Author: Chris Harris
Page Count: 192
Reading Age: 6+
#CoverLoverBookReview received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions are 100% mine.
October 3, 2023
Chris Harris is my favorite poet! His poems are always so creative and SO FUNNY! I literally cannot choose a favorite from this collection, although the caveman one is definitely near the top. ❤️
January 30, 2025
It's not often you can say that a book had poems that made my 13 year old roar with laughter and also made me bawl like a baby. We absolutely loved it!
March 10, 2024
Shel Silverstein is still the master of silly children’s poetry, but this collection has its moments. My favorite poems - by far - are the sequence of limericks masquerading as a glossary. A few excerpts:
Alliterative language looks lovely.
Consonance crackles and creaks.
Assonance has
A class-act pizazz,
While sibilance slithers and sneaks.
Kennings make bright letter-bridges.
Neologisms look scranzy.
To show, in your fiction,
Some chap has poor diction,
Malapropisms are handsy.
Antimetabole’s chiasmus;
Chiasmus is antimetabole.
Anaphora’s so nice,
I’m explaining it twice;
Anaphora’s so nice,
It’s my favorite device.
And non sequiturs? Man, I love pizza.
Finally, I’m not sure where to put this in my review, but it’s probably worth mentioning that some of Andrea Tsurumi’s illustrations are explicitly gender non-binary. Something you may want to be prepped for when you read this with your kids.
Alliterative language looks lovely.
Consonance crackles and creaks.
Assonance has
A class-act pizazz,
While sibilance slithers and sneaks.
Kennings make bright letter-bridges.
Neologisms look scranzy.
To show, in your fiction,
Some chap has poor diction,
Malapropisms are handsy.
Antimetabole’s chiasmus;
Chiasmus is antimetabole.
Anaphora’s so nice,
I’m explaining it twice;
Anaphora’s so nice,
It’s my favorite device.
And non sequiturs? Man, I love pizza.
Finally, I’m not sure where to put this in my review, but it’s probably worth mentioning that some of Andrea Tsurumi’s illustrations are explicitly gender non-binary. Something you may want to be prepped for when you read this with your kids.
July 29, 2023
Reaching for the Shel Silverstein comparison seems like an easy go-to with children’s poetry, but this is one of the few cases where it’s merited. The same magic, the same perfect balance of poignancy and absurdity, the same profound respect for and understanding of kids and their weird busy brains. SO good. I’m buying this for everyone.
January 2, 2025
This was an absolutely wonderful collection of poems and small stories. A great combination of Shel Silverstein’s funny poems and The Stinky Cheese Man, with some truly beautiful entries that brought a tear to my eye. The narration in the audiobook was fantastic, and I found myself laughing out loud many times. This would be great to share with kids who are new to poetry or poetry averse.
September 11, 2023
Nonsense of the best sort. Clever and funny!
December 1, 2023
LOVE LOVE LOVE. Hilarious, entertaining, and heartwarming. I never thought I’d find poetry like shel Silverstein again but this almost surpasses it??
January 22, 2024
There are a lot of delightful, very funny poems in here! But my favorite poem, near the end, called “Watch Out, World” was actually quite poignant and got me a lil misty eyed!
August 2, 2024
Not quite as amazing as his first poetry book but still a lot of fun.
October 10, 2023
A funny poetry book. The author pokes fun at adults, kids, words, grammar, and more. I bought the book for the library. I listened to the audiobook and can’t wait to see the art in the book. The mishmash of limerick, villanelle and haiku had me laugh-snorting. Great audiobook with a variety of voices.
January 1, 2024
The book made me do it! Hilarious antics, made even better by Andrea Tsurumi's art!
My Review
Here are things about monsters
who give kids a fright,
also things on the pages
that’ll last for the ages –
at least till tomorrow night.
Just follow the page numbers,
they add to the theme
of silly, yet wise,
a dreamy surprise.
No matter the goofy,
I like that it’s spoofy
and a poet’s extreme
that may make you scream
with laughter!
Don't miss this one!
My Review
Here are things about monsters
who give kids a fright,
also things on the pages
that’ll last for the ages –
at least till tomorrow night.
Just follow the page numbers,
they add to the theme
of silly, yet wise,
a dreamy surprise.
No matter the goofy,
I like that it’s spoofy
and a poet’s extreme
that may make you scream
with laughter!
Don't miss this one!
August 10, 2023
Very solid rhyming!!! Some cute rhymes, some very funny, others poignant.
Listened to the audio (2 hrs)
Listened to the audio (2 hrs)
August 3, 2023
Laugh out loud funny with lots of hidden gems to discover.
July 26, 2023
Listened to this on audiobook with my kiddos, and they loved it as much as I did! I laughed and cried, sometimes in the same poem.
March 31, 2025
This extremely clever (a few poems I had to read twice to get them) book of poetry will be popular with fans of Shel Silverstein.
2025 Update: I listened to the audiobook of this and thought it was extremely well done.
2025 Update: I listened to the audiobook of this and thought it was extremely well done.
finalists-2023
October 11, 2023From Travis @100ScopeNotes https://100scopenotes.com/2023/05/11/...
February 11, 2024
Not only are the poems funny and quirky, but there are also funny footnotes, and some of the page numbers at the bottom of the page have something funny or factual next to them. For example, next to "95" is the statement: "The number of theses once nailed to a door." Or next to "53": "The Love Bug Car's number." The Glossary of Terms at the back of the book is several stanzas of poems, with each term explained by being its own example. For instance, "A simile flits like a songbird." Or "Clichés have no thrills--they're as old as the hills..." And on top of all that, the word "Buffalo," which got loose from its poem, wanders here and there throughout the book. Black, white, and green illustrations by Andrea Tsurumi illuminate each poem. The bibliography includes "Books by Chris Harris and Andrea Tsurumi," "Books by Chris Harris, But Not by Andrea Tsurumi," "Books by Andrea Tsurumi But Not By Chris Harris," and "Books By Neither Chris Harris Nor Andrea Tsurumi (Partial List)." Lots of fun for poetry-loving youngsters.
November 8, 2023
SO much better than so much other "children's poetry." Yes, there's a bunch of AABB and ABAB rhyming, but a lot of other poems that play with all kinds of formats and language.
I loved the footnotes in "I Love My Siblings So Much!"; "One Half a Poem" is pretty brilliant; I am the title character in "The Corrector"; the competing haiku and limerick are amazing; a middle name being "..." is sublimely absurd; "Parents are the Greatest!" is true; the poem about snakes made me LOL; the use of texts in "You Are Never All Alone" is very zeitgeist, leading into Jozy and Silas' simple yet effective collection of poems; I want to teach all of my students "The Perfectly Still"; "Song of the Mayfly" also made me LOL; the "Terrible Fables" were meta and hilarious; "Detritus" is brilliant.
And you know what, I just bumped my rating up to a 5 for the amazingly creative page number notations.
Well done, Chris Harris. Bravo.
I loved the footnotes in "I Love My Siblings So Much!"; "One Half a Poem" is pretty brilliant; I am the title character in "The Corrector"; the competing haiku and limerick are amazing; a middle name being "..." is sublimely absurd; "Parents are the Greatest!" is true; the poem about snakes made me LOL; the use of texts in "You Are Never All Alone" is very zeitgeist, leading into Jozy and Silas' simple yet effective collection of poems; I want to teach all of my students "The Perfectly Still"; "Song of the Mayfly" also made me LOL; the "Terrible Fables" were meta and hilarious; "Detritus" is brilliant.
And you know what, I just bumped my rating up to a 5 for the amazingly creative page number notations.
Well done, Chris Harris. Bravo.
May 29, 2024
I knew Chris Harris has been steadily earning his modern-day-Shel-Silverstein crown, but I think we might need to give him the whole ass throne at this point.
A meta masterpiece for the ages, Harris weaves cleverness and creativity into every poem (along with the stray buffalos that got loose on page 35) to create a treasure trove of wordplay that pivots deftly from "A Poem About Snakes In Which We Tried to Use Actual Snakes For Every Letter S But Unfortunately the Snakes Aren't Cooperating" to a gentle exploration of an imagined future in "What Will You Be": "You can't yet know all that you may be; the seed does not contain the tree."
It's just.....so good. Read it, learn it, live it, love it.
A meta masterpiece for the ages, Harris weaves cleverness and creativity into every poem (along with the stray buffalos that got loose on page 35) to create a treasure trove of wordplay that pivots deftly from "A Poem About Snakes In Which We Tried to Use Actual Snakes For Every Letter S But Unfortunately the Snakes Aren't Cooperating" to a gentle exploration of an imagined future in "What Will You Be": "You can't yet know all that you may be; the seed does not contain the tree."
It's just.....so good. Read it, learn it, live it, love it.
December 2, 2023
So excited to see a sequel to his first poetry book, which I loved. This one did not disappoint. Hilarious, witty, reflective (and even made me tear up once). I read them aloud to my boys, but some were best enjoyed on my own. I grew up on Shel Silverstein, and normally when I review poetry books (especially ones trying to be funny for kids), they always fall short compared to good ol' Shel. But these two are definitely right up there if not beyond. Even the details in weaving poems together throughout the book (and the page numbers and index are even hilarious!! And the back flap author/illustrator bios area). Excellent all around. Well done!
January 20, 2024
This book was so much fun! I didn't even notice at first that the page numbers at the bottom had references to the number itself. The rhyming seems pretty natural, not contrived, and is often very clever. Even the index is funny. It's tough to pick favorite poems, because so many are so good, but I'll try anyway.
*"The Most Disobedient Kid in the World"
"The Okay House"
"Dare to Be the Same"
"Parents are the Greatest"
"The. Place Where the Lost Things Go"
(But, "The Road to An Aha!" Made Me Dizzy)
It's probably also best to read this in more than one sitting, so that you can better appreciate the craft that went into it.
*"The Most Disobedient Kid in the World"
"The Okay House"
"Dare to Be the Same"
"Parents are the Greatest"
"The. Place Where the Lost Things Go"
(But, "The Road to An Aha!" Made Me Dizzy)
It's probably also best to read this in more than one sitting, so that you can better appreciate the craft that went into it.
March 13, 2024
I got this book after I saw a site to say it was fun for kids and adults. It took awhile to get the smile on my face - I may be to old - But it got me and I really enjoyed this. My initial reason to read it was to see if my 11 yr old grandson would like it. It does remind me of Shel Silverstien but it is obviously more current.
The poems are fun and appropriate for older kids and if you get it - be sure to look at the pages numbers - they are wonderful. And the section where the kids took over dad's writing or awhile. I loved the mentioning of what you want to grow up to be, may not turn out that was - and that is ok>
The poems are fun and appropriate for older kids and if you get it - be sure to look at the pages numbers - they are wonderful. And the section where the kids took over dad's writing or awhile. I loved the mentioning of what you want to grow up to be, may not turn out that was - and that is ok>
December 7, 2024
Chris Harris's comical book, My Head Has a Bellyache: And More Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups, is packed with funny children's stories and poetry. Children are certain to enjoy the playful wording and unexpected events within Harris's writing. It’s a fun way to enjoy reading and have a good time with words. This book would be a great choice for a classroom library to help kids love reading and have fun with language. The book teaches students that poetry doesn't have to be boring, but it can be fun and enjoyable to read!
October 4, 2023
Plenty of fun for all ages
There are so many laugh out loud hilarious poems in this book. Grammar and literature nerds especially will find lots to love. I’ve been irritating my kids with it all day wandering around the house reading in their general direction delighted that there are finally poems to express my frustration with grammar gaffs they refuse to acknowledge. The audio book is superb, too.
There are so many laugh out loud hilarious poems in this book. Grammar and literature nerds especially will find lots to love. I’ve been irritating my kids with it all day wandering around the house reading in their general direction delighted that there are finally poems to express my frustration with grammar gaffs they refuse to acknowledge. The audio book is superb, too.
January 21, 2024
What a fun entertaining read. This author is the new Shel Silverstein. Just silly nonsense, but at the same time so savvy! Older readers will learn a ton of new words and be able to catch even more humor. Very unique- I can't imagine the heavy lift to put a book like this together. Don't miss the page numbers- they are hilarious. I would be very happy if this gets some Newbery love at tomorrow's announcement, but the illustrations may be too essential for the committee to consider it.
February 25, 2024
Harris is no Shel Silverstein. There is not one verse in here that I want to memorize or share. It's silly for the sake of being silly; I feel no depth, resonance, or even juicy wordplay. And yes, I read the whole thing, even the page numbers, even the index.
... Ok, I'm wrong. I did use one bookdart. One poem is worth mentioning. *Never Give Up on Your Dream!* shows the reader the importance of punctuation in a cute way.
... Ok, I'm wrong. I did use one bookdart. One poem is worth mentioning. *Never Give Up on Your Dream!* shows the reader the importance of punctuation in a cute way.
March 9, 2024
I read this aloud to my 5-year-old granddaughter and we both thought it was hilarious and incredibly entertaining. I think it would be even more enjoyable to kids a bit older -- 3-6 graders in particular. It's a delightful blending of playful nonsense poetry, self-deprecating silliness, and illustrations that literally dance across the pages. (The roaming buffalo's periodic appearance throughout the book was a hoot.)
December 9, 2024
I found this very humorous, it is full of poems about different scenarios that are extremely funny! Each character is introduced in its own funny way, which I found cool about this book. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a sense of humor that can be dumb at times, which makes it even funnier! Harris created an even funnier way of introducing it to his audience as well as creating it in an audio book as well, that lets him self-express throughout it.
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