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Book Summary

Reviewed by Peter Lewis

This is a nice early work by children's book all-star Maurice Sendak. Every month in the year has a poem with the soup theme. The simple illustrations add warmth and character to the poems.

Is It Any Good?

4

Sendak delivers a charming little book of poems and creatively maintains the chicken-soup-with-rice theme all the way through. Each poem is well crafted, and the artwork gives the book a warm feeling, much like chicken soup itself. There is a child's sensibility at work in the notions of a whale spouting chicken soup and of floating down the soupy Nile.

After a few readings, the words "chicken soup with rice" become like good-luck pieces that can be deployed on many occasions: Anything that's genuinely worthwhile, anything that sees you through -- that's chicken soup with rice. When a feverish 4-year-old asks for chicken soup with rice, a parent knows he or she is in the presence of something elemental.

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