Thelonius Monster's Sky-High Fly-Pie

Judy Sierra is the author of Wild About Books which was a New York Times #1 picture book best seller and the winner of the 2005 E.B.White Read Aloud Award, given by the Association of Booksellers for Children. The author lives in Castro Valley, California.
Edward Koren has published nearly 1,000 cartoons in The New Yorker magazine. He has illustrated How to Eat Like a Child by Delia Ephron, A Dog's Life by Peter Mayle, and Pet Peeves by George Plimpton.The illustrator lives in Brooksfield, Vermont.
From the Hardcover edition.

Kindergarten-Grade 3 An incomparable rhymester has teamed up with a master cartoonist to conjure up some haute cuisine on the fly. The tune for I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is likely to echo in children's minds as they listen to the words of Thelonius Monster's Sky-High Fly Pie, in which an earnest monster chef intends to swallow hundreds and thousands of succulent flies. After obtaining some helpful hints from a spider via e-mail, Thelonius creates a sticky crust, gathers flies, attaches them to the crust, and invites eleventeen ravenous monsters for dessert. The resulting creation is a thing of beauty: the flies hum, they sparkle, they play orchestral music. And, alas, they fly away. Thelonius has forgotten to bake the pie, and off it goes. The words are carefully chosen: Up, up the staircase/it whirred and it whined/with all of the monsters galumphing behind./It whizzed out the window./It whooshed to the sky./Bye-bye, fly pie! Koren's illustrations, done in black, white, and green, are perfectly fused with the story. Children will love the illustrated jokes, such as pie flies singing and playing instruments while monsters dance around them, holding a pie cutter. The scruffy style gives all the characters a cheerful, easygoing beatnik look that is enormously appealing, and the layout is perfectly suited to the text and illustrations. A lovable and entertaining work of art. Susan Weitz, formerly at Spencer-Van Etten School District, Spencer, NY
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