There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell! by Lucille Colandro

Still, past performance and the wacky illustrations promise library, classroom, and bedtime thrills. Like many of the books in this astoundingly popular and drawn-out series, this one abandons the metrical structure and the logic of the original, and unlike some, it does not add educational tidbits. The mortal peril of ingesting heaps of the ridiculous has disappeared: There’s no more threat that “perhaps she’ll die.” Frequent repetition of imagine to rhyme with dragon might prove trying, but the zany action overcomes the tedium: Lee’s cartoon characters, bug-eyed and bulbous-nosed, slide down the old lady’s maw and float in her belly.

The light-skinned old lady scarfs down a dragon for no discernable reason: “Can you imagine?” The dragon is followed by a tan-skinned princess “to guide the dragon,” a light-skinned knight “to soar with the princess,” a castle “for all to assemble,” a moat “to surround the castle,” a light-skinned mermaid “to float in the moat,” and finally “a book.” That volume proves to be a purgative: The old lady “began to exhale,” and “out came a magical fairy tale.” The one page of the fairy-tale book shown depicts the knight saving the princess from the dragon (the mermaid is just an onlooker) above the final phrase, “Happy reading!” No guiding, soaring, or assembling in sight. A very silly fairy tale–inspired riff on the nursery rhyme.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell! by Lucille Colandro