Messin' With the Rhyme Scheme: Nothing Rhymes With Orange by Adam Rex

Sure, Orange has that one claim to fame. He's got an major fruit named after him. It is a bit of a distinction. After all, nobody calls a banana a "yellow."

But in the world of fruit, Orange has a hard gig. Being the color of highway warning signs and traffic cones doesn't build much of a fan base. And being practically un-rhymable, Orange is pretty much left out of the coveted end-of-line position in versification.

When there's a sunny fruit tale to be told,
Orange is left out alone in the cold.

HIT THE BEACH IN YOUR CABANA

WITH A PEACH OR A BANANA.

Hey! How much worse than that rhyme can it get? Orange is ready to audition for any line in this book. I mean, when this author stoops to rhyming cantaloupe with "antelope," how picky can he be? And anyway, a kid doesn't have to be dense not to know what a quince is!

And get a load of this seriously forced quatrain!

I THINK CHERRIES ARE THE BERRIES
AND LYCHEE IS JUST PEACHY.

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA
IN A BOOK BY FREDRICH NIETZCHE

[SIGH!]

What's a cute fruit, nutrish and delish, got to do to get at least a walk-on line in this book?

At least author-illustrator Adam Rex gives the sadly neglected but colorful orange top billing in the title, in his latest, Nothing Rhymes with Orange (Chronicle Books, 2017). The author takes silliness seriously, and his artwork is no less playful, filled with fruity characters (and a bearded Fred Nietzche) with stick limbs and expressive faces that finish with a fruit bowl turn-over party. This is a great goofy book with comic characters for preschoolers, but for learned primary schoolers, the wry and sly wordplay with rhyme and rhythm is quite sophisticated, with a humorous nod to philosopher-savvy adults who get the good fortune to read this one aloud.

As a creator, Adam Rex has a genius for playing with the concepts of language and literature, as displayed in his spiffy spoof of the toddler bedtime classic Goodnight Moon in his parody classic Goodnight Goon: a Petrifying Parody, (see my 2008 review here.) And then there are last year's back-to-school hit, School's First Day of School, (review here) and this spring's hit done with Drew Daywalt, The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors. (see review here,) all off-beat and all hard to beat.

Thus spake Booklist: "Cheers for not only nutrition but for thinking outside the bowl to include the unfairly marginalized."