Timothy Tunny Swallowed a Bunny by Bill Grossman, Illustrated by Kevin Hawkes

Caught in ridicuclous and quirky situations, Timothy Tunny Swallowed a Bunny is a very enjoyable read. I found myself laughing at the absurdity of the situations. The situations are so unlikely that they are funny. With a collection of 18 poems, each poem tells a new story. A sing-songy, quick rhythm accompanies each poem. Each poem is as witty as the next. The This book again shows students how an idea can expand to create a variety of poems with a common thread holding them together. In this case, a reader must stretch a bit to see the connection that people are caught in unusual circumstances. The characters described have unique traits distinguishing each one from the enxt. Timothy Tunny is only the first among several memorable characters mentioned. These characters range from Walter Lackwards whose head is on backwards to Kevin T. Moses, a man with seventeen noses.

One poem that I found particularly entertaining was Joe Tate who always "became what he ate." On the day he ate nothing, "poof! he was no longer there." Another was The Barber who accidentally cuts off her clients' ears. When she tells him what happened, he says "What?" because obviously without his ears he can't hear. Based on these examples, it becomes apparent that this book contains very silly humor with unrealistic scenarios. Still, the sense of the impossible is always fun to read about in books.

I enjoyed the poems, but more than the poems, I enjoyed the pictures accompanying the poems because they added another dimension to many of the poems. In The Woman in Town, the woman is afraid she'll drown if her nose gets wet so she wears a small scuba suit on her nose, which is believed to work because she still hasn't drowned. Ironically, the woman lives in a desert. She's surrounded by cactus and sand and sitting in an empty boat without any sign of water. Without the picture, I don't feel that this book would have had the same intended effect. The setting of the poem highlights the absurdity of the situation. Similarly, in Kevin T. Moses, he's a man with seventeen noses who grows a new nose each birthday. Seeing Kevin with seventeen noses was entertaining, but it was even more so because in the picture he stands amongst a whole field of red and yellow tulips. Imagine the potent smell of the flowers if you had seventeen noses. Yikes! No wonder he carries around tissues with him, and his noses are red at their tips.

Grossman often uses double meanings in his poems that makes this book adult-friendly as well as kids-friendly. I don't think kids would pick up all these subtle language clues in their first reading. In Bill Hackbar, Bill works at a snack shack all four years of college. Although he gained little knowledge he did end up "very well rounded." In the picture, Bill Hackbar is a very round, plump man in undersized clothes. With similar rhyming patterns in each poem, each character's name corresponds to the first set of rhymes in the poem. This is one of those books that students might keep coming back to because I read through it 3 times just so I would catch all the subtleties in both the language and the pictures. It's humorous; it's fun; it's absurd- a perfect combination for that student with a wild imagination and a sense of the extraordinary!