Mother Goose of Pudding Lane

Gr 3 Up–Just who was the real Mother Goose, who gave us all those rhyming verses? Raschka proposes here that she must have been Elizabeth Foster of Boston. “In 1692, she married old Isaac Goose from the city, a widower with 10 children.” The author speculates on this brief biographical bit in four pages preceding the book’s title page. In this creative scheme for the main text, his own brief comments about the Goose marriage and family life introduce two or four pages of selected Mother Goose and other traditional rhymes. Set in large red type in the upper left-hand corner of the spread, Raschka’s poetic quips, some rhyming with the previous one, could be assembled into a single poem. “Elizabeth Goose/and/Isaac Goose/Had children quite a few.” Here just one old verse, the account of the old woman living in a shoe, demonstrates the point. Radunsky’s gouache and pencil sketches scatter humans and animals across pages in varying colors and textures. A series of small portraits fills some views—Elizabeth Foster, Isaac Goose, and each of their 14 children, or Gregory Griggs and his 27 wigs, for instance. Many views include messy little pencil sketches among painted figures. In some busy views the figures are an odd match with the text, but there are many fun details throughout the book. Readers might approach this as just another Mother Goose collection. While most of the rhymes are familiar, some seem less so in the phrasing. Raschka provides no author note or acknowledgements of sources for the factual bits or the rhymes. A publisher’s promotional piece notes that Radunsky died prior to the book’s publication. This title should be purchased where his work and that of Raschka have been popular.