cover image There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey!

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey!

Lucille Colandro, illus. by Jared Lee. Cartwheel, $6.99 paper (32p) ISBN 978-0-545-93190-8

Colandro and Lee have collaborated on no fewer than a dozen books featuring this voracious elderly woman, and in this outing she starts off by gulping down a live turkey: “I don’t know why she swallowed the turkey,” Colandro writes, “but she’s always been quirky.” (Truer words.) Lee captures the mounting chaos in scraggly illustrations that show the woman swallowing a football, boat, horn of plenty, and more—the perfect assortment, it turns out, to create an impromptu parade, once everything has been disgorged, of course. The rhymes are far from smooth, but the events are so preposterous that readers in the midst of laugh attacks are unlikely to care. Ages 4–6. (Aug.)