Tales of Whimsy, Verses of Woe

Tim De Roche's Tales of Whimsy, Verses of Woe is a book of darkly funny nonsense poems for 7 year olds where hardly anything ends the way you'd expect.

What happens

There's no single story. It's a collection of poems, some just a few lines long and some that go on for quite a while. They're the kind you read aloud and then get asked to read again.

A salmon spends years trying to be eaten by the King. A beast in a cave refuses to shave. A boy brushes his teeth with superglue and washes his face in soup from the bin, and he's still terribly polite when you ask how he is. Bailey O'Bannon hates the colour green so much she sets out to paint the whole world red and blue (it doesn't go to plan).

The rhymes are very clever and full of daft made-up words. There's a Jabberwocky poem where it's not brillig at all. There's a noisy musical family where the youngest finally yells for PEACE AND QUIET. And there's a poem about favourite noises that ends with a toot, which will go down very well in some houses!

Now the woe part, because it's real. In one poem a boy keeps telling his family there are monsters. A monster bites off his dad's head, his mum is turned into a frog, a dragon fries his granny and a goblin swallows him whole. Another poem starts with a king already slain, and in another God rings a boy up to say he's doing fine and will see him "when ya die".

It's all played for laughs, but it's quite dark. The vocabulary is grown-up too. Words like "incongruous" and "legislator" pop up, and a few jokes are really for the adult doing the reading (there's one about Vermont).

So it's probably best shared rather than handed over. A child who's easily frightened, or who takes things very literally, might find some of it unsettling. A child who giggles at gruesome fairy tales and loves the sound of silly words will probably think it's brilliant.

What to read next

If a good gruesome rhyme is their thing, try Revolting Rhymes. Roald Dahl tells Cinderella the way he says it really happened, and it's much more gory than the version you know.