And that's all, folks. If I hadn't consumed an entire handtruckful of Diet Coke posting all these Bizarre Children's Book reviews, I'd say I need a drink. [excuse me for a sec... ok, I'm back.]
If I missed any reviews--like, say, the one you sent in--please drop me a line; otherwise, thanks again to everyone for an awesome response. [If your response was somewhere south of awesome, by all means, let me know. And if you know people who've stopped reading the site until that damn book review contest is over, tell them its safe to return.]
Anyway, because they give their stuff for free and because that makes them awesome too, I'd like to give another thanks to the prize sponsors:
Sparkability
modernseed
and
Javis Davis.
If all the repetition has somehow landed Javis and Sparky on your name list, well, just send a picture after your mini [!] is born.
Anyway, there's one last entry, a non-review, really, but it wraps up the whole bizarre books for kids idea so brilliantly, it almost makes me feel part of an important pedagogical exercise instead of a transparent play for attention.
As only a book expert can, Garrett at Daddyzine delivers 2300 historically contextualizing, footnoted words [and that's just "part 1"] explaining why he didn't review a bizarre book:
the whole suspension-of-disbelief agenda gets taken pretty much for granted in most of the kids' books one finds littering the floor in our house, and the premise of, say, a juvenile trumpet-playing cat in need of rescue at the hands of (or perhaps, rather, the dextrous cloven hooves of) a squadron of pigs with colanders and sauce-pans on their heads -- well, such a premise does not necessarily suggest a tale which will hold up under the harsh glare of rational scrutiny[1].He teases out the categories of book bizarreness, and points out the potential folly of revisiting formative books from our own childhoods. I am in awe.
In which I commence the review of a bizarre children's book and am waylaid along the way (Part I). [daddyzine]
It's possible I missed it, but... who won?
[yeah, let me get back to you on that today. -ed.]