Where the Sidewalk Ends

Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends is a collection of silly poems for 6 year olds about flying shoes, a boy who watches so much television that he turns into one, and a girl with a rubbish problem.

What happens

Most of the poems are very short. Some are four lines long. The longest ones do run on a bit.

That's a lot of the appeal. A child can read one, decide it was excellent, and read it again, all inside a minute.

They're properly funny as well. Three friends called Ickle Me, Pickle Me and Tickle Me go for a ride in a flying shoe and never come back. Captain Hook has to be extremely careful about picking his nose (and about opening sardine cans, and about shaking your hand). One poem is written from inside a lion by somebody who got too near the cage and apologises in advance for the handwriting.

Then every so often Silverstein stops joking. Listen to the Mustn'ts is eight lines telling a child that anything can be. Colors is a boy describing his own skin and eyes and hair, and it finishes by saying that all the colours he is inside haven't been invented yet. The title poem is about leaving the dark streets behind for a place where the grass grows soft and white.

The comedy does have a ghoulish streak. A boy loses his head and can't go and look for it, because his eyes are in it. Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout's rubbish piles up until it reaches the sky and things end badly for her. One narrator spends a whole poem spitting off a twenty-sixth floor balcony and enjoying himself enormously.

None of it is gory and most six year olds think it's hilarious. But if you've got a child who takes things literally and thinks about them later at bedtime, read a few yourself first and see how you feel.

It's American too, so it's sidewalks and garbage throughout.

What to read next

If this sort of thing lands, The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse is in the library as well. Quentin Blake chose the poems and drew all over them, and it runs from Lewis Carroll to some very strange anonymous rhymes about paralysed donkeys.