LitPick Review
"What's the Weather Inside?" by Karma Wilson is a fun little book of poems. Despite what the cover and title may allude to, this book covers more than just the weather. In fact, poems about the weather aren't even a major theme in the book. Rather, the poems chosen are comical little poems about facetious nuances in life that children notice. There are many plays on words and copious double entendres. Animals, sports, emotions, family life, and more dance on the pages alongside clever illustrations in black and white. The rhyme schemes vary and the poems are all relatively short.
Opinion:
This book is appropriate for children. It encourages creative thinking as well as semantics. Words are used with different meanings in the poems to generate curiosity. The point is for a youngster to read a poem and see a picture that they like; this will propel them to pick up a dictionary and look up new words they are unfamiliar with (that may just sound a bit silly, too!). As for illustrations, they are drawn with old fashioned style. There is nothing inappropriate in the book. As a matter of fact, the scariest part of the book involves a poem about a substitute teacher with horns on his angry head.
