A Penchant for Peas
Categories: Children's Books
Versions of The Princess and the Pea have long cornered the pea themed picture book market. But, a new surge in fun and humorous pea related fare addresses this oft-overlooked market, offering laugh out loud alternatives for those of us who have long known that the under utilized pea was truly a comic genius in disguise.
In Amy Krause Rosenthal’s Little Pea, the title character, Little Pea hates eating candy for dinner, but his parents will not let him have his spinach dessert until he cleans his plate!
In Bill Grossman’s My Little Sister Ate One Hare, the narrator's ravenous sister devours and manages to keep down some decidedly unorthodox delicacies: "My little sister ate 3 ants. She even ate their underpants. She ate 2 snakes. She ate 1 hare. We thought she'd throw up then and there. But she didn't." Four shrews (plus their smelly socks and shoe"), five bats, six mice, seven polliwogs, eight worms and nine lizards don't interfere a whit with the insatiable child's digestive system... until she makes the mistake of eating 10 peas and everything comes back up, alive and well. Gross? Yes, but also laugh out funny.
It might look like she's just rolling them around in distaste, but Ivy Louise can't eat her peas when they're performing such splendid circus acts (high-diving into juice, balancing on alphabet blocks) on her high-chair tray! Imagination and dinner takes a wild ride in Eat Your Peas Ivy Louise by Leo Landry.
Told that she can't leave the table “until every pea has been chewed,” Mabel takes drastic action and hides the peas in a most unadvisable spot. Her plan, however resourceful, has a major flaw: “peas in the ear make it tricky to hear! Words seem confusing, their meanings amusing, ideas become hard to convey.” The ensuing pea-inflicted hearing loss leads to a comedy of errors as the child spends the day misinterpreting her mother's increasingly concerned requests. Mabel O’Leary puts Peas in Her Ear-y by Mary Delaney
What will it take to get Daisy to eat her peas? In Nick Sharratt’s Eat Your Peas, Mom starts out with a bribe of ice cream. But even when she cumulatively ups the ante to an inducement that includes never having to go to school again and the purchase of 92 chocolate factories (each clearly delineated in the illustrations), Daisy is unyielding. What will change Daisy’s mind? "I'll eat my peas if you eat your brussel sprouts," she tells Mom, whose lip promptly begins to quiver at the prospect.
Who could resist the title alone: You read to me, I'll read to you: very short fairy tales to read together (in which wolves are tamed, trolls are transformed, and peas are triumphant) Designed with budding readers in mind, this collection features eight fairy tales, each given a new twist and set in three columns and three colors as a script for two voices to read separately or together. You, of course will want to flip directly to those triumphant peas!
To complete your pea theme explorations, you’ll want to check out Mini Grey’s The Very Smart Pea and the Princess-To-Be. Finally, the "real story" of the Princess and the Pea, told from the pea's point of view.
