By Jack Prelutsky
Illustrated by Carin Berger
Greenwillow Books
Hardcover

What's an umbrellaphant? What's a panthermometer? How about an Ocelock?

Take a bunch of words and scramble them up. Give them a definition with a humorous twist and you've got Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems.

Fun poems about quirky combinations of animals with musical instruments, rain gear, nature and other objects will tie those tongues and make your child laugh. Get silly with your kids by reading the poems or let your readers in progress take a stab at reading the poems themselves.

Behold the Big Umbrellaphant Excerpt The bizarre ALARMADILLOS Are a clamorous quartet, For they're in a constant frenzy ... They're incessantly upset. ©2006 Laura Numeroff Published with permission

If the unusual descriptions, like what happens when you cross a shoe and a hornet, don't get you, the illustrations will. The creative drawings are humorous on their own.

Add in the poems and you'll never look at a clock and an octopus the same way again. They form a clocktopus, in case you were wondering.

Bookworm's Briefing
Children's book author Jack Prelutsky also wrote the bestsellers Scranimals and The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders. He's a master of wordplay in his books and Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is no exception.