Troy Thompson's Excellent Peotry Book - Hardcover

Winner of numerous awards in his native Australia, Gary Crew lives in the mountains of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland with his family, where he enjoys gardening, reading, and playing with his dogs Ferris, Beulah, and Miss Wendy. Craig Smith is one of Australia's most prolific and popular children's book artists. He lives outside Melbourne surrounded by parrots, kangaroos and kookaburras.

Grade 4-7-At the beginning of sixth grade, Ms. Kranke introduces her students to a yearlong assignment in which they will learn about different forms of poetry and write their own. The best poems will be entered in a contest at the end of the year. One of the students, Troy Thompson, is a smart, funny kid who has had his share of heartache. He includes a ballad and a sonnet about his father, a police officer who was killed while on duty. Readers learn about his dogs, Ferris and Bueller, in haiku and limericks, and of his girlfriend through ballads and acrostic poems. He also writes poems about stinky sneakers, the condition of the boys' bathroom, and smarmy game-show hosts. Troy enters a sonnet about his teacher in the contest and readers learn, through a photo on the final page, that he won the grand prize-a computer. This colorful book resembles a student's notebook. Left-hand pages contain Ms. Kranke's instructions, while those on the right show Troy's poetry and whimsical mixed-media illustrations. The poems are typewritten, handwritten, or printed from a computer and "pasted" into his book. This title is complete with silliness and serious topics. Display and booktalk it with Sharon Creech's Love That Dog (HarperCollins, 2001).
Shawn Brommer, South Central Library System, Madison, WI
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