The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith

Hey, Story Seekers!

I was walking down the road and I saw...

No.

I'm not doing it yet.

Because once we start describing this donkey, things get out of hand fast.

The Wonky Donkey is written by Craig Smith and illustrated by Katz Cowley. It started as a song, became a picture book, went roaring around the internet after one grandmother couldn't get through it without falling apart, and somehow turned a single donkey into an international celebrity.

Not bad for a fellow with an eye patch.

If you're new to Book Explorers, I'm Jungle Jimmy the Book Explorer, children's author, dad, and longtime performer for kids. Readit the Book Worm is my childlike sidekick, and he has already discovered the most important feature of this review.

He gets to say "hee-haw."

This may take a while.

Book Breakdown

Somebody is walking down the road.

They see a donkey.

Hee-haw.

At first we learn one thing about him.

Then another.

And another.

Each new detail adds another rhyming word to his increasingly ridiculous name.

That's the whole engine.

Smith doesn't throw away the previous words when a new one arrives. He stacks them. So the description gets longer, and longer, and considerably more dangerous for the adult trying to read it aloud without tying his tongue in a knot.

By the end you're dealing with a spunky, hanky-panky, cranky, stinky, dinky, lanky, honky-tonky, winky, wonky donkey.

Good luck.

Smith wrote the song back in 2005 after hearing a joke: what do you call a donkey with three legs? The book grew out of that, the song took the 2008 APRA Children's Song of the Year award in New Zealand, and Scholastic brought the picture book to American readers in 2010.

Katz Cowley handles the other half of the comedy.

Her watercolor donkey isn't standing around politely while the words describe him. He has a personality. He grins. He poses. He wears the eye patch like he chose it. There's a visual gag about his smell that Readit spent a suspicious amount of time studying.

He looks like he knows perfectly well the grown-up reading is about to blow the next line.

Which matters, because this is a book built for sound. The words make you anticipate the rhyme. Cowley's pictures give kids something funny to inspect while the reader tries to survive saying all of them.

For teachers and librarians: Scholastic puts it at ages 3 to 5, preschool to kindergarten, 24 pages. Library records give ATOS 3.6, 402 words, AR quiz 517307, 0.5 points. I'm leaving the Lexile out. The record I found says 990L, which is wildly out of step with a 24-page cumulative rhyme for preschoolers, and I'd rather give you nothing than a number that would send a teacher to the wrong shelf.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

This is a performance book.

No question.

You can technically read it quietly.

You can also technically eat cereal with a fork.

I wouldn't recommend either.

The whole thing runs on accumulation. Kids learn the pattern. They know the hee-haw is coming. They start anticipating the rhymes.

Meanwhile the poor adult has to remember an increasingly ridiculous chain of words without driving into a ditch.

That's where most of the fun lives.

The book gets harder for the grown-up at exactly the same rate it gets easier for the kid to join in.

That is a very good trade, and it's rarer than you'd think. Most participation books make it easy for everybody. This one makes it easy for the child by making it hard for you.

And because Smith wrote this as a song first, you can feel the musical backbone. The repetition isn't there because somebody heard repetition was educational.

It has a beat.

There's somewhere for the voice to go.

There's a moment for the audience to come back in.

As a performer that's the part I'd grab. Don't rush to prove you can say the final chain cleanly.

Let it get dangerous.

Let the kids hear the list growing.

Give them the hee-haw.

By the end, the room should know the game well enough to run it without you.

Readit's Review

HEE-HAW!

I told you.

Also, I think the donkey knows he's funny.

Look at his face.

He does not look embarrassed.

He looks like he's waiting for you to try to say his whole name.

I tried.

I got stuck.

There are too many donkey words.

And why does he listen to country music?

Does he have headphones?

Does he have a favorite song?

Can a donkey wear headphones?

Also the smell picture is gross.

I looked at that one longer.

I don't know why.

I just did.

HEE-HAW!

Okay, I'm finished.

Maybe.

What Others Think

This donkey has found a very large herd.

Goodreads has The Wonky Donkey at 4.45 out of 5 from 10,752 ratings and 1,055 reviews. That's an unusually strong number for a short cumulative picture book, and it's higher than almost anything else we've reviewed.

The theme that comes up again and again is the read-aloud itself.

One reviewer described reading it to her two-year-old after seeing the famous video of a Scottish grandmother laughing her way through it. Her son giggled and immediately asked for it again. Plenty of other reviewers mention that video by name and describe the laughter as contagious.

That viral moment was not a small blip. Scholastic later called the book an international number one bestseller and reported more than four million copies in print, and credited that grandmother's reading with handing an already successful book a remarkable second life.

Kirkus saw the read-aloud appeal too, particularly the cumulative wordplay and the comic additions Cowley keeps making around the edges of the text.

Which matches what I'd expect. The evidence here isn't really the star rating.

It's that the most famous thing about this book is a recording of somebody trying to read it out loud.

Belly Laugh Scale

5 out of 5: Laugh-Out-Loud Legend

Yep.

Five.

Not because it has a complicated plot. It barely has a plot.

Somebody sees a donkey.

The donkey accumulates adjectives.

Good night.

But this isn't the Complicated Plot Scale. This book knows precisely what it wants to do.

It wants the kid joining in. It wants the grown-up wrestling with that growing pile of rhymes. It wants each new word to make the whole thing sillier than the last.

And Cowley gives the donkey enough attitude that you can almost blame him personally when your tongue quits.

Then there's the strongest field test any read-aloud has ever had. A grandmother tried to read this thing to her grandson, couldn't keep herself together, and millions of people watched it happen.

You don't get that with a book that only reads well in your head.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd hand The Wonky Donkey to preschoolers, kindergarteners, rhyme lovers, kids who like joining in, families who want a short funny read-aloud, and teachers who aren't afraid to make some noise during story time.

For kindergarten it fills a specific spot.

This isn't just a funny animal book. It's a book kids can participate in before they can independently read a word of it.

They can hear the rhyme.

They can remember the pattern.

They can predict what's coming.

They can supply the animal sound.

They can watch the description grow.

And they get the wonderful moment where the grown-up gets tangled and has to start the sentence again.

That is not a reading failure.

That's audience participation.

Just don't read this one like you're announcing the weather. The donkey deserves better.

It's on our list of funny kindergarten read-alouds for exactly that reason, alongside the other books that only really work when somebody commits.

Readit would like one final word.

HEE-HAW!

I knew that was coming.

Until our next expedition, keep exploring those books.

Jungle Jimmy & Readit