Ten Fat Sausages

February 24, 2020
“Ten fat sausages, sizzling in a pan” escape the stovetop for some short-lived freedom in this comedic twist on the predictable nursery rhyme. After the first wide-eyed sausage goes “POP,” revolt begins with sausage two, who interrupts the repeating rhyme: “Hang on a minute! I do not like this... I won’t go BANG and I won’t go POP,” Robinson writes. Instead, “hop, hop, hop,” he dives headfirst into the sink, but the carefree swim is cut short when someone pulls the plug, propelling him “straight down the drain.” His compatriots find that their luck isn’t much better: in Freeman’s colorful, vintage-style art, wiener four meets an unfortunate end in the blender (a nearby apple covers a grape’s eyes), sausage six heads “over the wide-open Freezer Top Ridge”—and straight into the ceiling fan—and sausage eight, grief stricken, catches the eye of a hungry cat (“Oh, drat”). Witnesses to their friends’ gruesome ends, the final two links hatch a different kind of plan, one that successfully results in the stove being switched off. “Might this pair survive?” asks the narrator; the conclusion to this slight, sausage-filled adventure will leave readers gulping. Ages 3–7.

January 1, 2020
An irreverent take on a nursery rhyme. "Ten fat sausages, sizzling in a pan," starts off this rhyme, replicated in the frontmatter. It's typically sung, useful when trying to keep young children entertained or teaching them to count down by twos. But when the story starts, while one sausage goes "POP," the other doesn't go the expected "BANG," as each even-numbered sausage tries to make their escape, but "tries" is the operative word. One is somehow accidentally blendered along with an extremely concerned green bell pepper, another is eaten by a cat, and so on, until the two remaining sausages band together to make their escape. There's plenty of humor here, mostly carried by Freeman's expressively painted foodstuffs and blocky, realistic scenery--a vintage refrigerator, fast-whirling ceiling fan. Unfortunately, the jaunty rhythm of the original barely translates to picture-book form here, and too often unfortunate readers will have to wrench the scansion or ignore rhyming conventions ("sauce" attempting to rhyme with "course," for example) in order to make it work for storytime. The ending is confusing as well; the sausages limp off outside, far from unscathed, but how they went from "one main course," terrified on buns, to freedom remains a mystery. This twisted version of a familiar favorite is too inconsistent to satisfy. (Picture book. 3-6)

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.