Jeanne Willis Quotes

This book written in rhyme is hilarious, witty and just plain entertaining. Honor Brown with her wild, vivid imagination paints the worst scenario of going to school ever. She insists that the water tray is full of killer sharks, food poisoning is on the horizon, beatings are the norm and even her friends are monstrous. Such a drama queen extraodinaire!

Honor Brown hates, absolutely hates school. It’s horrible--there are monsters and petrifying teachers. The students are crooks and pirates and everyone is so mean! They throw them out of windows and make them walk on glass. It’s so, so horrible, but what happens when it’s over?

Why would she “want” to go to school, when ...her teacher is a warty toad? ...her friends are crooks and villains? ...the principal chops your head off if you talk in class? It can’t be true...or “can” it? Find out in this laugh-out-loud account of the horrors of going to school, told from the point of view of a girl with a huge imagination

It is interesting as it includes much exaggeration as to why the main character, Honor Brown, seems to hate school but then ends with her in an emotional state when she finally realises that she will really miss it once she has left.

Although the target audience would be children, the content itself could be considered to be fairly gruesome and mature for this age group. The text incorporates a regular rhyme scheme, direct speech in quotation marks, rhetorical questions as well as repetition and capitalisation of significant words.

A neat little book with poetry in it reminding us how much kids can hate school, somedays I can relate. The fun part is the rhyming and showing kids no matter what you are talking about, we can put in into a poem.

This is a really fun, playful poetry book and I can see why children would like it. Honor Brown tells of school in a very imaginative, negative way which is actually really funny.

“There was a fine young lady, And her name was Honor Brown. She didn’t want to go to school. She hoped it would burn down.”

She talks about her teacher being a toad, describes her classroom as being a hole, and goes as far as saying she is fed worms for lunch. However, although Honor Brown depicts her school as being such an awful place, the ending of the story takes an unexpected turn when Honor Brown finally finishes school and doesn’t have to go back as she cries and sobs and states that she will really miss school.

Honor doesn’t like going to school and uses her vivid imagination to describe all the reasons she doesn’t like it. At the end of the book Honor is sad because although she doesn’t have to go to school anymore, she still says she’ll miss it.