Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros?
The author of Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros, Shel Silverstein, wrote one of my wife’s and my favorite books, one that makes us cry almost every time we read it - The Giving Tree. So, I may have had high expectations when reading this one. And this was a cute book at first.
Every spread of two pages has a different, mostly silly, interaction between a boy and a rhinoceros. The illustrations are simple black and white line drawings but still, or maybe because of, my little one genuinely laughed at several of the interactions between the boy and the rhinoceros.
However, there are a couple pages, which at first I thought were probably more culturally acceptable when it was written, that I couldn’t get past. They include a reference to mom hitting the boy for doing something wrong and the boy aggressively yelling at the rhinoceros. But then I realized it was written in 1983, not 1950. It’s possible the author was just trying to be real, but there’s no excuse or reason for those couple of pages. Even if it’s reality for a child, no child needs to have that read to them or see that when reading a book, a moment that is supposed to feel safe and let a child escape to a new, exciting or happy place.
You could skip those pages when reading, or you could just skip the book and spend your time reading something else. Even if it’s something like The Giving Tree.
Cautions: Like I mention above, there are two pages I would not read or show to a little one. One is a picture of an angry mom wanting to hit a little boy and the other is a picture of the little boy aggressively yelling at the rhinoceros.
