I'm Just No Good at Rhyming: And Other Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups

This highly imaginative book of poems uses a whole arsenal of clever tricks to get kids to giggle while challenging them to think. The wordplay in I'm Just No Good at Rhyming sensitizes kids to language. Is breakfast chocolate choco-late or choco-early? Other poems are brainteasers; for instance, stretching kids' thinking about time and sentence structure. Sometimes author Chris Harris goes meta, as when illustrator Lane Smith comments, "Sorry, Chris, I have to stop you right there. This poem is too ridiculous." There are also running gags: poems that riff on previous poems. And in a really rogue move, Harris messes with the page numbers, eliminating all eights, which he combines with a poem about a kid who wasn't taught the number eight. He apologizes for putting that kid's parents in charge of pagination.

There are some unusual and surprising rhymes: "tomato/not today though," "grateful/irateful." Mostly, the rhymes trip off the tongue, but there's the occasional near-rhyme misstep: "fierce/years"? And in one poem, Harris leaves his kid-friendly POV to deliver a slightly sour lesson from a parent. But the overall tenor is pure fun, and Smith, who excels at humorous illustration, is the perfect pairing.