Hoberman,
Mary Ann. 1998. THE LLAMA WHO HAD NO PAJAMA. Ill. San Diego , CA
BOOK REVIEW
THE LLAMA WHO
HAD NO PAJAMA is a collection of 100 poems written by Mary Ann Hoberman. The length of the poems varies from a mere
three lines to two pages long. It is
well-organized with a table of contents in the front of the book and an index
of first lines in the back of the book.
These features make the book a great resource for a teacher trying to
find a specific poem by Mary Ann Hoberman to share with a group of
students. The poems are about subjects
children can relate to like animals, balloons and money. The illustrations by Betty Fraser are simple
and done in watercolor.
Many of the
poems have the traditional rhyming at the ends of the lines. The
poem the book is named after, THE LLAMA WHO HAD NO PAJAMA, is an excellent
example of this. Later in this same
poem, “Or what in the world will I wear?
Or what in the world, In the wumberly world, In the wumberly world will
I wear?” shows clever use of alliteration and meter.
Mary Ann
Hoberman carefully crafted the meter and arrangement of words in some of her
poems. In “Rabbit”, the words are
arranged so that all the lines with “bit” in them line up. The rhythm of this poem sounds like a rabbit
hopping. Even though the poems do not
have the imagery or emotional content that some other collections of poems
have, the meter, clever word rhyming, arrangement of words, and alliteration
make up for this deficiency.
Horn Book Magazine, 1998. “The
poems--peppy verses immediately identifiable as Hoberman's by their use of
alliteration and repeated words and lines--seem to cover every subject under
the sun; all are dependably child-centered.”
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