PB 14:14 Day 10: RHYME AND WORD PLAY (again) with "Surfer Chick"

If you have a rhyming manuscript to be critiqued, Kristy Dempsey is the one! And she's giving away a critique as one of the prizes for this cosmic event. (Unless the week 1 winner already chose her.) Anyway, today's book, again, features both rhyme and word play.

Title: Surfer Chick
Author: Kristy Dempsey
Illustrator: Henry Cole
Publisher: Abrams
Year: 2012
Words: 326

This book is short. Summary: "With Dad's help, Chick overcomes her struggles and learns how to surf." It has 18 couplets formatted as quatrains on the page. The word play is clever. Notice how in all of the rhymes, there's only one near rhyme, or off rhyme (paddle/battle). Really, it's so close, it counts. If you have ONE near rhyme in your ms, even if it's more of a stretch, you MIGHT be able to get by with it. But no more than one. I wish I could quote the first three stanzas to give a great opening (hey, maybe I could for beginnings/endings). But this book's strength is truly the rhyme and the word play. If a rhyming book doesn't have rhyme as one of its top two strengths, then something is wrong. This book, however, does everything right.

Here are the rhymes:

1. dad/pad
2. Roost/produced
3. turf/surf
4. board/adored
5. paddle/battle
6. knack/back
7. more/shore
8. arose/toes
9. doubt/wipeout
10. chicken/thicken
11. along/strong
12. soared/board
13. wave/brave
14. splash/flash
15. skill/thrill
16. chick/trick
17. Roost/introduced
18. quick/Chick

Here are some of the word play phrases throughout. It's not onomatopoeia, it's related words and/or puns.

Bird phrases:

• Two birds of a feather - a chick and her dad
• hatched on the beach
• swim like a duck
• foul-tempered battle (resonates as fowl-tempered)
• ruffled her feathers
• scrambled her focus
• confidence soared (you know, birds fly, right?)
• on a wing and a prayer
• Dad crowed
• fearless and plucky (rhymes with ducky, though not in this stanza)

Beach words: 

• radical
• dude
• righteous
• bummer
• wipeout
• ripping along
• swelled up
• scoped out the water
• slid through the water
• one-footed thrill
• gnarly

And my favorite stanza:

Alone on the sand,
Chick simply felt chicken.
She rested on shore
till her courage could thicken.

As a parent, I would much rather read a book over and over again that includes great word play like illustrated here. And this book is a great example, though my FAVORITE is Library Dragon by Carmen Agra Deedy. If you missed any of the days, here they are again. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9.

Have a great day, and keep on keepin' on...Add your link below.