Brave Potatoes
Rarely does potato poetry reach such laudable heights as in this piece  of inspired lunacy from the tomfool team Toby Speed and Barry Root ofTwo Cool Cows. Surely these  noble tubers have long deserved some sort of epic treatment (one wonders, for  instance, why there's never been a "Charge of the Spud Brigade" or "The Tater  Not Taken"), butBrave Potatoesat last gives the forsaken roots their  well-deserved due, in a wonderfully weird and lyrical tribute.Squeezed in between the prize perennials and the summer squash at a county fair  4-H hall, the potatoes begin their night of adventure, rubbing their eyes as  they stir to life. "Everyone's asleep in the Bud and Bean Arena. / So all the  prize potatoes with their eyes wide open topple to the hard-knocky floor." This  lumpy little crew has just one thing in mind: heading down the midway to take a  ride on the Zip. "Over at the Fair, / potatoes in the air! / See them flip,  flip, flip on the wild and woolly Zip!" But across town at the Chowder Lounge,  Chef Hackemup has other plans for these high-flying potatoes--hoping to make  curly fries, chips, and gumbo à la Zip, "Off goes / Hackemup / with a bag  / to pack 'em up." Can these spuds possibly survive his shredder and his grater  and his So-Long-See-You-Later? Only if they're brave enough, of course, and you  can bet that all the other vegetables held captive in Hackemup's  mad-scientist-style kitchen are counting on them.Speed's well-crafted verse ("If real words won't do, I make some up," he admits)  is matched only by Root's luminescent and hilariously detailed illustrations.  (Ages 7 to 10)--Paul Hughes