DELICIOUS HULLABALOO/PACHANGA DELICIOSA

By/Por Pat Mora

Illustrated by/Illustraciones por Francisco X Mora

Award-winning poet and author Pat Mora takes readers along to a delightful party featuring salsa-making lizards and guitar-playing armadillos. Delicious Hullabaloo/Pachanga Deliciosa, written in verse in both English and Spanish is a single-poem picture book. Mora has aimed this publication at children ages 4-8 years old.

The poetry is written in half-rhymed and rhymed couplets in English, as well as Spanish. It has a great rhythm or cadence for reading aloud in Spanish but the English at times is a bit difficult. Young readers will fall in love with the bright colors and cartoonish pictures of lime-colored lizards and purple armadillos dancing and "drinking moonlight". The audience's imaginations will go wild as the double-page water-color illustrations enhance and support this story in verse.

This was a fun book to read - especially to my 4-year old daughter. It is bright, imaginative and fun. Great as a read-aloud or read silently, surely both avid and reluctant readers will love to "dance to moon and starlight too, join in the fiesta, the delicious hullabaloo."

Mora, Pat. 1998. DELICIOUS HULLABALOO/PACHANGA DELICIOSA. Ill. Francisco X. Mora. Houston: Pinata Books.