The Lady Who Lassoed Me

If you enjoyed Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat, you'll love the sequel that was shortlisted in London for the poetry prize awarded by The Times Literary Supplement. This book is fun for readers of all ages. It's a collection of comic and narrative verse that rhymes, scans and (mostly!) makes sense-like the tongue-twister Dinah Saw the Dinosaur. The Lady Who Lassoed Me and The Ghost of the Yellowknife Inn both belong in the canon of great narrative ballads written to entertain. The Ghost is a narrative ballad about the epic search for gold in the Canadian Arctic. This book descends from the tradition of light verse by A. A. Milne and Robert Browning, by Alfred Noyes (The Highwayman) and Kipling, and by Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee). It also looks back to comedians whose work was literary, clever and acerbic, like Tony Hancock, Peter Ustinov, Peter Cook, and the Harvard Maths professor Tom Lehrer.