If You Were a Chocolate Mustache - Hardcover

J. Patrick Lewis is the 2011 winner of the NCTE Award for Poetry and is the current Children's Poet Laureate. He has written more than sixty books for children and adults, including Spot the Plot: A Riddle Book of Book Riddles and Please Bury Me in the Library. He has two other books scheduled: When Thunder Comes: Poems for Civil Rights Leaders (Chronicle) and The National Geographic Book of Animal Poems (an anthology Lewis edited for National Geographic). He lives in Westerville, Ohio.

Matthew Cordell is the illustrator of many books for children, including The Knowing Book and If You Were a Chocolate Mustache.  His title Wolf in the Snow won the 2018 Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children. He lives in the suburbs of Chicago. Visit matthewcordell.com.

From Hippopotabus and circul8 to Cucumbersome, puns are a big part of the fun in this wry collection of nonsense verse by U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate Lewis. Kids will love the wordplay and silliness that extend through rhyme and colloquial phrases: I flew a mammoth jet that’s how / I learned to dino-soar. With each short verse, the line drawings add to the farce and uproar: the words of a trail of crumbs twirl across the page, for example. Young kids won’t get all the allusions (When Billy met Ginny), but there is a lot here to make them laugh and look again at the sound and meaning of what they take for granted. One of the best poems is The Impossibles, with a quiet twist about giving up on trying to reach Forever and settling for Now and Then. A great choice for sharing across the curriculum. Grades 2-5. --Hazel Rochman