Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls

Alamo Elementary 4th through 6th grade, Fort Stockton (Texas) Independent School District, the home of the library where I first discovered this book. For three years, I, John Hoffman, and Mike Jones repeatedly checked the book out between us. We allowed no one to take charge of the volume. Yearly the school put on a Declamation contest in which all the classes, 4th, 5th, and 6th grades recited poetry from memory. The winner was allowed to say his poem in front of the PTA. I learned at least a dozen of the poems, and even recited a number of them in 1985 for a visiting alumnus dinner at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg, VA) for about 8 minutes once Randall J. Stipes, a professor of biology there, discovered I had them, and others like them, in my repertoire. They rented me a tuxedo and paid me $100 to do entertain the guests. This is a book for the ages. I didn't know I could find it. But I recently bought one of the few paperback copies of it used. I hope to find a hardcover and, one day, give it to my children. I recite the poems annually to my students where I teach English Language Arts--my alma mater in my home town where I first learned of the book. Get the book, several copies of it. Reprint it if it goes OUT of print. Save this book! Never let it die! (I really like this book). Danny Andre' Dixon, Classroom Teacher Fort Stockton High School. [email protected]

The reason I know is because I was the 8 year old boy, suffering through Leticia Campbell's third-grade class at Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary School back in 1973, when I ran across this book. It provided me comfort through the long, slow figurative torture of Ms Campbell's class and the literal torture of being paddled by Mr. Bibee, my sadistic school principal. Back to the book: how can you go wrong with verses like the following? Into the family drinking well Willie pushed his sister Nell She's there yet, `cause it kilt her Now we have to buy a filter. I haven't picked the book up in 30 years and yet I can still recite over a dozen poems out of the book, just as good as the one above. Buy this book for your preadolescent children, and you won't regret it!

Add me to the list of people for whom Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls is a cherished piece of childhood. It was *the* hot book at the school book fair the year it came out, and I still have my hardcover copy, a tad worse for wear, but intact. Loved it then, love it now. What kid *wouldn't* love a book about kids getting eaten by lions, or punished by Santa for saying he doesn't exist, or simply exploding from gluttony? (Shades of Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life!) It was, and is, gross and dark and funny. I may have to buy a used copy for my niece and nephew.

I discovered this book in about the 4th grade, and it has always stuck in my heart. Great collection of nonsense verse. Illustrations by Tomi Ungerer, which are very special.Much of the verse is from the victorian age, although I read "Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout" here years before Shel Silverstein made a recording of it. As is the case with a lot of juvenile literature of the past, there is often cartoonlike violence. A boy gets eaten by a lion at the zoo. A gluttonous child gets so fat he simply rolls away. Another child is such a pig at the table his parents put a real pig at the table next to him.There was a sequel volume published, but I can't remember the title.