Don't Say Poop!

March 15, 2021
Silly, rhyming euphemisms to jazz up powder-room humor. Matejek-Morris shows remarkable wordsmithing skill in his laugh-out-loud lines of text. The narrator is depicted as a child who opens the book with a warning: "There are nice words like puppy and buttercup and snickerdoodle, and there are rude words." To help readers avoid saying rude words, the child then delivers a torrent of tongue-twisting, rhyming euphemisms for poop, pee, burp, belch, butt, boogers, and farts. For the titular rude word, for instance, readers could substitute "humdrum bum crumbs, / float-or-sinker, / major stinker, / sometimes mushy from your tushy, / smelly belly funky jelly." It all culminates in a cumulative barrage of words that readers will be hard-pressed to say without dissolving into giggles--unless they are distracted and dismayed by some truly unfortunate visual characterization. The protagonist is depicted as a brown-skinned person with black, curly hair. Color associations in the cover art and some interior pages may cause the eye to link the shade of the character's skin with the anthropomorphized turds that appear along with the aforementioned euphemisms. If that weren't bad enough, when the cumulative text arrives, it's presented as a grinning (and farting, urinating, defecating, belching, nose-picking) tap-dancing spectacle that evokes caricatures of minstrelsy. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8-by-14-inch double-page spreads viewed at 50.1% of actual size.) Just...don't. (Picture book. 3-6)

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March 15, 2021
Grades 1-3 Some words are very rude. Next time you need to say poop, for example, consider using "humdrum bum crumb" or "smelly belly funky jelly" instead. And rather than using the word pee, you might try "glitzy spritzy spray ballet." This book of tongue-twisting replacements for impolite words includes options for everything from burp, butt, and boogers to farts and underwear. It is a book to either love or hate, with zero middle ground, and you will know from the very endpapers--a disco party full of dancing coils of gleeful poop--which way you are likely to feel. While there are certainly those who wouldn't touch this concept with a 10-foot roll of pine-scented paper towels, there are others who will find the opportunity to tell a room full of giggle-ready elementary-schoolers that tooting is now a "blame-passing, friend-sassing, fast-blasting goof poof" the most delightful thing on the planet. And even those less inclined to share crass humor will appreciate that the final takeaway is to always say "Excuse me."

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