Review by Booklist Review
A play on the traditional preschool rhyme about 10 fat sausages frying (and exploding) in a pan, this sassy retelling explores the idea of what would happen if the stubborn sausages refused to go bang! or pop! and leaped off the pan to escape instead. It (surprisingly, disturbingly, and amusingly) doesn't end well for many of them. In a dark twist of fate, the sausages get chomped by cats, eviscerated in a blender, whirlpooled down a sink drain, flung by the ceiling fan, and eventually eaten by the humans doing the cooking. But the carnage is quite amusing as told in innocently rhyming couplets that mimic the source material. The illustrations are cleverly done in mustard yellows and ketchup reds, and the spunky chipolatas are adorable in their expressiveness. While it's definitely on the macabre side of funny (weeping when their best friends go pop, watching each other be diced by blades), this will have specific appeal to certain young readers (and their caregivers) who enjoy dark comedy.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Ten fat sausages, sizzling in a pan" escape the stovetop for some short-lived freedom in this comedic twist on the predictable nursery rhyme. After the first wide-eyed sausage goes "POP," revolt begins with sausage two, who interrupts the repeating rhyme: "Hang on a minute! I do not like this... I won't go BANG and I won't go POP," Robinson writes. Instead, "hop, hop, hop," he dives headfirst into the sink, but the carefree swim is cut short when someone pulls the plug, propelling him "straight down the drain." His compatriots find that their luck isn't much better: in Freeman's colorful, vintage-style art, wiener four meets an unfortunate end in the blender (a nearby apple covers a grape's eyes), sausage six heads "over the wide-open Freezer Top Ridge"--and straight into the ceiling fan--and sausage eight, grief stricken, catches the eye of a hungry cat ("Oh, drat"). Witnesses to their friends' gruesome ends, the final two links hatch a different kind of plan, one that successfully results in the stove being switched off. "Might this pair survive?" asks the narrator; the conclusion to this slight, sausage-filled adventure will leave readers gulping. Ages 3--7. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An irreverent take on a nursery rhyme."Ten fat sausages, sizzling in a pan," starts off this rhyme, replicated in the frontmatter. It's typically sung, useful when trying to keep young children entertained or teaching them to count down by twos. But when the story starts, while one sausage goes "POP," the other doesn't go the expected "BANG," as each even-numbered sausage tries to make their escape, but "tries" is the operative word. One is somehow accidentally blendered along with an extremely concerned green bell pepper, another is eaten by a cat, and so on, until the two remaining sausages band together to make their escape. There's plenty of humor here, mostly carried by Freeman's expressively painted foodstuffs and blocky, realistic scenerya vintage refrigerator, fast-whirling ceiling fan. Unfortunately, the jaunty rhythm of the original barely translates to picture-book form here, and too often unfortunate readers will have to wrench the scansion or ignore rhyming conventions ("sauce" attempting to rhyme with "course," for example) in order to make it work for storytime. The ending is confusing as well; the sausages limp off outside, far from unscathed, but how they went from "one main course," terrified on buns, to freedom remains a mystery.This twisted version of a familiar favorite is too inconsistent to satisfy. (Picture book. 3-6) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
