Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Addams, Charles (Samuel) - Zena Sutherland

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ZENA SUTHERLAND

Some element of the usual Addams style seems lacking [in The Chas. Addams Mother Goose], perhaps a spontaneity due to working with a prescribed text, so that the macabre touch seems, in some of the illustrations, superimposed and the pictures just aren't funny. There are a few pages that have high humor, a few that are grotesque, and the rest are simply a mite dull. Here and there, a picture demands the background not all children have: for example, the farmer's wife (and the farmer) in "Three Blind Mice" are adapted from "American Gothic." Older children who usually enjoy Addams may be put off by the nursery rhymes; not all children find this humor appealing, but those who do are a special group of readers who have early become devoted Addams fans.

Zena Sutherland, in a review of "The Chas. Addams Mother Goose," in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Vol. 21, No. 6, February, 1968, p. 89.

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