Awful Ogre Running Wild

This has become a favorite with my four year-old. He simply adores it! I love the rich vocabulary and amazing illustrations and my son never gets tired of laughing at the antics of Awful Ogre and his ogre friends. Good stuff!

Reviewed by Evan Weldon (age 6) for Reader Views (10/08) "Awful Ogre Running Wild" by Jack Prelutsky is a book of funny poems about ogres doing funny things. One poem is about ogres exercising by lifting ship anchors and boulders and breaking the floor and walls when they throw and drop things. Another is about when one of the awful ogre's toaster breaks; so, instead he uses a dragon to toast his bread. My favorite poem is "Awful Ogre Enters a Cook-Off.." The pictures in the book are fabulous. You can tell that the ogres are absolutely gigantic. Regular people are about the size of an ogre's thumb. For my favorite poem about the cook-off, there are gross pictures of things to eat such as a dish of water with sharks attacking a human, and a plate with a roasted chef with an apple stuck in his mouth, and mice and cactuses with a long sword through them kind of like a kabob. I would recommend "Awful Ogre Running Wild" by Jack Prelutsky for people who like gross things and people who like things about giants. There are some kind of long words like "pirouettes" and "exhilarating," but mostly I could read this book myself.

Prelutsky's sense of humor is, as always, a delight. Prelutsky and illustrator Zelinsky make a great team.