Hurry, hurry, Mary dear

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Blegvad wittily refreshes his late friend and collaborator's waggish poem about a hardworking, much-put-upon wife and her hortatory husband with this masterfully illustrated edition. As he mentions in a foreword, Blegvad models his Mary on the pen-and-ink version drawn by Bodecker himself in his nonsense collection Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear! (reissued in 1987 and still in print); Blegvad, however, works in watercolors, splendidly reproduced here with a limpid clarity. The heroine, Mary, is a reedy woman. Her nose has a shape that would not be out of place on a snowman, and her white hair is tucked tidily into a bun--at least as the verse begins. Her husband delivers all the lines: "Not a minute to be lost,/ in a minute we get frost!/ In an hour we get snow!/ Drifts like houses! Ten below!" He puts Mary through her (nonstop) paces as the rhythms escalate: "Churn the butter, smoke the hams,/ Can tomatoes, put up jams." In the company of a black cat, Mary toils inside and outside her well-appointed home, oiling snowshoes, stoking fires, attending to sometimes ludicrous tasks (she "strings the beans" by hanging them on a clothesline). With each pause in the verse, Mary sags, her hair unraveling, her shoulders stooping, but she rallies with each new volley of rhyme. Of course, the husband, lolling in a rocking chair, gets his due in the end; what readers get is an absolute treat, two consummate artists making the most of a good joke. Ages 7-up. (Oct.)

Beth Gutcheon

. . .[A]bsolutely nothing could spoil this charmer of a book. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Pity poor Mary, whose frenzied efforts to prepare for the onslaught of winter leave her red-faced and exhausted! Short rhyming couplets speed readers from page to page as Mary's husband issues imperious commands from the comfort of his rocking chair. Faster and faster she works—digging, cooking, churning, canning, and preserving. Accompanied by a small black cat she races frantically from one task to another, indoors, outdoors, upstairs, and down, until her patience wears out and the inevitable occurs. Blegvad's detailed watercolor drawings of Mary's hard work and her increasingly frazzled appearance in the face of her husband's idleness will delight children, whose sense of poetic justice will be grandly satisfied on the final page.