The New Toe: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone

Jennifer Falkner is an Ottawa-based freelance writer and bookseller.

The poems in The New Toe are short and generally made up of simple
rhyming quatrains. Some are amusing, like “Green,” where a child’s
little white dog is concerned over its owner’s growing obsession with
a certain color, or “The New Toe,” where the narrator’s little
brother is nonchalant over his sister’s surprising growth. But overall
they tend to be a little forced; the vocabulary and delivery is
unoriginal and repetitive. The illustrations are colorful and bright,
each one representing a scene from one of the poems. They are also
fairly simple, and not likely to hold a child’s interest. Not a
first-choice purchase.