Reviews

And the Green Grass Grew All Around: Folk Poetry from Everyone by Alvin Schwartz

tophat8855's review

2.0

Meh. I like poetry collections like this (and so do my children), but wasn't a fan of the chapters on how to tease other kids and the negativity around school. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the school system, but the anti-teacher rhymes bug me. And some of the insults were essentially "she's fat." Bothers me.

sindri_inn_arsaeli's review

2.0

Aside from how dated this collection feels, (it was published squarely in my childhood, while I was growing up presumably hearing these chants, and many feel stilted and stuffy to me,) it also feels entirely half hearted. Meant to be a collection of the fascinating concept of organic folk poetry, it ends up feeling like it's all out of context. A very few selections have a brief description of when the poem or chant might be used, or what prompts its use, but most are just left untidily on the pages. The spacing with the illustrations makes it not always clear which poem fragments should be connected or not. And the notes at the end are so sparse, I'm really not sure why they couldn't have been included with their matching chapters, since that's an easier way to absorb that information for most children than flipping to an index at the end. It's not interesting enough for most kids, and not dedicated enough for interested adults, and ends up just sort of falling flat.