Stopping by jungle on a snowy evening

In a hilarious duel over a certain famous poem, Robert Frost and a young passerby with no interest in quiet meditations on nature and life argue about how it should go: "He gives his harness bells a shake / Because he's being attacked by a humongous snake!" In Rowan-Zoch's cartoon scenes, the olive-skinned lad, astride a blue hippo in a jingle-bell collar, and the rumpled "Mr. Frosty" pass through snowy woods while tussling over rhymes, setting, and action--until a huge meteor hits the frozen lake ("There are no meteors in my poem!") and the ensuing tidal wave carries the duo to a fork in the road. Cue the flash of creativity ("Hmmm-- / two roads diverged in a wood, / and I--I took the one / less traveled by . . . / Hey, that's not bad!") cut short by a final, gleeful bellow of "ALIEN INVASION! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" Readers may be divided over which version they prefer--or even tempted to suggest similar improvements for other classic poems. In any case, Morris does close with the original verse.

In this riff on the celebrated poem, a youngster rides a blue hippo with a jingle bell harness through a wintery setting. The brown-skinned child speaks the opening lines: "Whose woods these are I think I know." The child then deviates a bit: "My little hippopotamus must think it--" Suddenly, the youngster encounters Robert Frost, peering out of a window superimposed over the trees (no house is depicted). The poet is clearly upset by the word change and the strange sight:"Hipposlive in the jungle." The child, the hippo, and Frost suddenly find themselves in a colorful jungle scene, along with tropical birds and animals peeking from the foliage. The young protagonist continues to rewrite the poem to fit the new environment. When Frost points out that there is no snow in the jungle, the child tries substitutes: Rain? Dough? Deciding that the verse needs more excitement, the child invents disasters such as meteors, a tidal wave, and an alien invasion. Somehow, Frost manages to get through the poem and even starts writing another well-known work. The disconnect between the staid poet and the imaginative child makes for a highly amusing example of metafiction, while the digital art blends elegantly composed wintry backdrops with cartoonish images of the characters and various animals, with gleefully chaotic results. Sets an American literary classic on a wonderfully wrong turn.(Picture book. 6-9) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.