Lynn's Review of The Inner City Mother Goose

I was wondering why this book, based on Mother Goose nursery rhymes, was in a high school library and not in libraries for younger patrons. I quickly realized that it was because it is a modern interpretation that shows the effects of inner city life. It includes current society issues such as drugs, stealing, crime, and temptation. It became a banned book due to its honesty in portraying inner-city situations of the low-socioeconomic. David Diaz's dark illustrations depict the hardness and reality of those that struggle daily in these types of situations.

The paintings are harsh, with thick black outlines and shadows detailing facial expressions as the characters smoke, sell their bodies, pollute, worry, kill, and turn a blind eye. The demise of society is characterized with dark blues and grays and spotlights the resulting ugliness.

I was very surprised by this book. Even though the title hinted at its contents, I wasn't prepared for the honesty and straightforwardness of the subject matter, especially presented in the Mother Goose format. I also found it interesting that in Eve Merriam's 1982 introduction, she writes of suspecting that a particular verse having "a line that contained an extremely vulgar, if commonly used, thirteen-letter word" was to blame for the book being banned. When I came to that particular verse, I found it odd that the entire page was missing from the book, and I could see the torn edges from the binding. I found this book in a high school library, but it seems that someone at some point had done some censoring...