Daddy and Me and the Rhyme to Be

PreS-Gr 1–In this adaptation of the animated series “Karma’s World,” Karma decides to write a special birthday song for her father. Her discarded attempts at rhymed lines include: “I love it when me and Daddy stir batter with a spoon/ And our favorite thing to do is play soccer on the moon!” and “He makes me feel safe from when I sleep to when I wake/ And at night he tucks me in under a giant pancake!” These bizarre false starts, illustrated literally as imagined digressions, feel as contrived to readers as they do to the characters rejecting them. The book’s title itself suffers from the same forced quality, with the confusing phrase “the rhyme to be” left unmentioned and unexplained. The illustrations resemble awkward freeze-frames digitally cut and pasted from a cartoon, ill-suited to the picture book medium.