The Ice Cream Store

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The sheer fun of Lee’s words and sounds is paired on every page of
this book with McPhail’s lively, comic pictures. Lee earned a loyal
following with Alligator Pie, and young fans will be delighted with the
current nonsense.

Lee combines the kind of realism that permits ready recognition and
empathy with delightful fantasy. He uses repetition, variation,
alliteration, onomatopoeia, irony, and all the tricks of comic verse for
the very young and the young at heart.

I like “The Perfect Pets,” an odd collection of beasts calculated
to drive their owners mad: “I had a DOG / And his name was Doogie, /
And I don’t know why / But he liked to boogie; / He boogied all night
/ He boogied all day / He boogied in a rude, / Rambunctious way.”

Lee touches occasionally on serious themes, as in “Wild,” addressed
to “a human child”: “The wild things say goodbye / Each time we
take their homes away / And die!—die!—die! . . . Before the earth is
through / We have to make it green again / So do!—do!—do!”

Good fun for preschoolers and for the fortunate ones who read to them.