Children's books that don't quite rhyme

[PolarBlair]

Does anyone else find this so annoying?
I have no problem with books that don't rhyme at all.
Then there are geniuses like Julia Donaldson and Dr Seuss where it rhymes and flows so well.

But the ones I find so annoying are the ones where the syllables are off, the rhymes are not quite rhymes (in any accent), the same word has been used twice to make line A & B rhyme.

These are often self published but do the authors not realise? Do they not ask friends?

I often want to take a red pen, correct them, and send them back

I do alter my accent when reading to force the rhyme.

Like in The Smartest Giant in Town by Julia Donaldson scarf and laugh do not rhyme for me but I put on an English accent and go for scarf and larf!

Can yo u give an example? If its rhyming 7 with anything I have sympathy. Mike Brunslow has characters looking to heaven a lot.

See, I don't think Donaldson always gets it right - there is a peculiar couplet in the highway rat, and scarf, laugh, giraffe don't all rhyme.

It's an accent thing as much as anything.

Scarf laugh and giraffe rhyme for me, must be impossible to make everything rhyme for every accent.

@SleepingStandingUp is that the ‘ten little’ series? We have a few and some of the rhymes for seven (oven?) are a bit tenuous.

I generally like Julia Donaldson ones but scarf/laugh/giraffe is not a rhyme in my accent, and some of her books I find difficult to get the correct rhythm for it to sound right (the lines about silly frilly dress in Zog and the flying doctors)

10 little super kids is hard to make flow i find

Songwriters tend to do this a lot. They force things to rhyme by using terrible grammar. Or they just don’t rhyme properly at all. In terms of children’s books, Tom Fletcher is a prime example. He’s a musician and his songs don’t rhyme, his children’s books don’t rhyme either, and they wouldn’t have been published at all if he wasn’t a celeb.

They rhyme for me too.

Yes, I hate this!

We have a couple of books that I detest reading to my son.

Dragon Stew is one (forget the author). He goes from rhyming within a sentence/line to rhyming beginning and end of a paragraph. (Im sure there's a more technical way to describe this). It halts the flow and makes reading it impossible

As others have said, Julia Donaldson books are full of rhymes that don’t work in many accents.

There are also some truly shit lines in some of her books. ‘His plaster gleaming pinkly as he zig zagged through the blue’ annoys me every single time.

Dr Seuss possibly is too, although many of those rhymes might just be simpler (hard to go wrong with hop and pop or cat and hat in most accents).

Writing consistent, rhyming poetry for all English speaking accents is a hard ask though.

I can normally force Julia Donaldson's to rhyme (she clearly didn't write with my short Brummie vowels in mind). I really hate the repeated bits of Highway Rat though - I can't get the rhythm right. And now DS can read, he knows when I skip over them

Dr Seuss made up loads of nonsense words in his rhymes too.

I can manage them after a fashion.

but I find ‘the robber snatched the sack and snarled’ a bit of a tongue twister.

Are the rhymes in the highway rat similar to the rhymes in the highwayman poem? Could be it isn’t a couplet but a … throuplet?

Loads of Julia Donaldson's lines don't scan in a Scottish accent, it gets on my nerves!

Ha ha, I saw this thread title and came to say, Julia Donaldson! I dont know where she is from but I dont think it can be Northern England!

Yes, we have them all which doesn't help but if you're going to rhyme numbers in book after book, at some point I guess you end up with oven 😂😂

My least favourite . It's so wordy compared to the others.

Oh I love his "there's an X in my book" books

When mine were little, I actually prefered those to the standard twee,all rhyming ones !

Yes I bloody hate it and pleased to find I'm not alone... I'm constantly on a boring rant that no-one in my family responds to about how annoying it is that children's authors seem to think the only acceptable way to write for small kids nowadays is in (frequently terrible) rhyme! Why?! I even find Julia Donaldson (side note: her monopoly over kids' lit is annoying to me too) frequently extremely irksome. Watching smeds and smoos last night and the Janet/planet rhyme was bugging me so much. Just so contrived to name an alien Janet to rhyme with planet!! Argh, thanks for giving me a space to vent on this issue that is v personally irritating but that must people could not give a shit about😂

(PS. Just thought of an absolute prime example of the weird half-arsed rhyme genre - Pirate Stew by Neil Gaiman)

There are some dreadful bits in Julia Donaldson (although scarf, giraffe and laugh do rhyme in my accent) - Superworm is the worst imo, it's so lazy!

This has reminded me of Squash and a Squeeze which used to bug me as it doesn’t scan properly! If you’re going to use a tum-diddy tum-diddy tum-diddy tum pattern then stick to it and don’t stick extra words in.

When reading to my toddler this is something that I’ve found,
Often now I bite my tongue or change the sentence round,
To make it work or smooth the flow, to offer a correction,
To he who chose that noun or verb or wrote with that inflection.

Rhyming schemes are easy if you take the time to try,
But it seems these days that authors are more motivated by,
Quantity over quality, (prose with brief evaluation),
And it will forever be, to me at least, a source of irritation.