She's a great artist. I would say she's not that good of a writer. It's the equivalent of drawing diagrams of everything. You don't need to spell it out. When you do that, it becomes uninteresting to read. The person who's reading it feels like you're talking down to them. They feel like you're saying you're better than they are. Nobody wants to read a book like that.

Not to be confused with "Three By The Sea" by Mini Grey, which appears to be significantly more interesting. It kind of meanders and doesn't go anywhere.

The language is pretty, but not ornamental, and that's one of the reasons it's so short. It's not great, but it's decent. There's just not much to it.

So it's a fictionalized account of a story that somebody told about somebody else. I'm not saying for sure it's inaccurate, but tales do change in the telling and retelling. It's definitely not something somebody would do today.

It's really cute. I would think that most children wouldn't get the emotional bits and would just think it was a funny book about having a rhinoceros for a pet. And it is funny. There's definitely no bad message to this. I don't think a child would actually get the impression from this that rhinoceroses make good pets. It's more or less a book of imagination, whimsy, and nonsense, and Shel Silverstein is a master of all three.

It's just a list of words. It's a rhyming list of words, so maybe that's a little bit entertaining. But there's nothing to it. There's no story. The rhyming is the only thing that could possibly keep your attention in this. It's decent rhyming, and decent meter, so what it's trying to do it does well, but in my opinion it's not trying to do enough, and comes off as disappointing.

If you take it from the perspective that a child will likely take it, I'm probably reading too much into it. A child will look at it and think, "Oh, there's a lot of food I don't like, and my parents sometimes resort to ridiculous lengths in order to get me to eat food that I claim to not like, and it sometimes turns out that I like it," so I think they'll identify with that. I guess the important part is that the main character does like it.

I guess the lack of realism in the drawings of the monsters is what made this not as scary to me as a child, and that monsters were not really what I worried about. The realism of the story and the humanizing of the mother are really good.

There's nothing really to it. It's enjoyable and light. My kids enjoy making funny noises. Silly things are attractive to children. The imaginative, whimsical aspects of this book are great. There's no real message to it, but it might encourage children to use their imagination and be more descriptive of things.

I think I would perform violence on somebody, possibly myself, if I was required to read this on a regular basis, especially out loud. I'm getting real sick of people telling me children learn by repetition. I have ceased to care.