Gwynne hits on some new material here with the tricks of pronunciation--"foot prince in the snow"---but otherwise he travels over the old terrain of idioms and homonyms that was better mined by Remy Charlip in Arm and Arm: A Collection of Connections, Endless Tales, Reiterations, and Other Echoalia.

While repetition can give a book a warm sense of familiarity or a pleasing lilt, or can invite reader participation, here Gwynne's failure to alter his delivery makes the book feel like an endless knock-knock joke: Daddy says, Mommy says, Daddy says, Mommy says ... it stifles the text, denies it oxygen.

The artwork, which looks like it was capably knocked off with a set of Magic Markers and some fast handwork, has an easy comfort to it. The illustrations have a five-year-old's vividness to them, though one child of that age group reacted to the coat-of-arms illustration--a dozen naked limbs draped around a coat hanger--with the highly evocative "Yuck!"

Gwynne's trilogy of books about verbal misunderstandings also includes A Chocolate Moose for Dinner and A Little Pigeon Toad.