Mom’s Choice Gold Award-Winner!

Before this book, if you had asked Poodle to name his favorite place, he might have said the Blue Desert. Or maybe he would have chosen Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Oh, stop it. Of course I know that Starry Night isn’t a real place. Except that it is. Poodle and his friends all went there in the last book, remember? They went into paintings, and I’d venture a guess that Van Gogh’s most famous masterpiece was their favorite.

But with this book, Poodle’s answer to the question of where his favorite place lies will probably change because this time, instead of going into paintings, Poodle and some of his best pals go into poems, and it’s utterly magical.

You see, in this book the friends are learning about clauses (level four of Michael’s four-level sentence analysis), and there’s no better way of studying clauses than to look at some of the most beautiful clauses in the English language—those written by some of the most talented wordsmiths in history. And if we’re going to go all in on something (and why wouldn’t we?), then, like our favorite scholar-chicken does in this book, we may as well go all in.

And that’s what they do. Poodle and What? and Dickinson and Burgull literally go through portals into poems. First they visit Robert Frost’s yellow wood, where two roads diverge, and the friends must choose whether or not to take the one less traveled by. Robert himself is there to watch them—and to point out the clauses in his poem. A distinguished poet instructing our savvy friends in a serene setting? It doesn’t get better than that.

Of course, Maybe mouse is in this book, along with her diligent assistant Bizzie, making sure that the actors stay focused and sharp. This is, after all, a play.

Stop it! Not you this time, the author. He’s insisting that it’s not a play; it’s his book. Well, he and Maybe can work that out. I, for one, wouldn’t want to cross Maybe. She’s tough.

But back to the story. The next portal in Poodle’s portal quest takes the friends into a lovely garden by Emily Dickinson, where not only does Dickinson (the Blue Mountain monster) meet the poet for whom he is the namesake, but the entire crew discovers the beautiful clauses in her poem, and the poetic elements, too. After that is a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson—as a boy—first in his room and then in his make-believe world, and finally they visit Emily again, this time during a ferocious and dangerous storm. But there’s a twist (you expect no less, of course), and the friends discover that their kindness can save them, even when facing an awful tempest.

These characters are not just reading poems; they are experiencing them as realities that they will never forget.

And neither will anyone who reads this book. It is filled with everything good: wonderful poems, superb writing by Michael that includes a sweet story as well as the words to make it both whimsical and real, gorgeous illustrations by artist Christopher Tice (he’s truly outdone himself yet again), and, as always, QR codes that enable readers to hear Michael narrate the story, which just makes everything that much more fun.

Oh! And grammar instruction. That too.

Note: Both the language arts concepts and the storyline of this book build upon those in the previous Poodle books. As such, the series is best read in order.