ALA Booklist (Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 1997)

The combination of food and farce makes for an affectionate rhyming picture book about a family of picky eaters who drive their mother frantic. As each baby is born, it makes its rigid nutritional tastes known through bellowing demands. For example, Peter wants milk, but it must be warm, not hot, not cold. Mary Lou has to be fed soft and squishy homemade bread. Jack--all he'll eat is applesauce. One twin wants poached eggs, the other fried. The line-and-color illustrations extend the silly fun as the comfortable house gets more and more cluttered and chaotic. Father is somewhere in the background, but the focus is on Mrs. Peters, nearly always pregnant, trying to play her cello, and increasingly overwhelmed by the appetites of her family. Then the kids surprise her, and themselves, in a gloriously messy climax that allows everyone to eat and Mom to have a life. (Reviewed March 1, 1997)

Horn Book (Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1997)

Mrs. Peters is worn out keeping her seven food-fussy children supplied with properly warmed milk, freshly made pink lemonade, homemade applesauce, non-lumpy oatmeal, homemade bread, and poached and fried eggs. An unexpected and happy solution is found when the tots concoct a birthday surprise for their mother. The illustrations have an air of Hilary Knight and are filled with many small and rewarding details.

Kirkus Reviews

Hoberman (The Cozy Book, 1995, etc.) renders the story of finicky eaters with an understatement that both children and those who cook for them will appreciate. Persnickety eaters—they are Mrs. Peters's cross to bear, and she has seven of them. One wants warm (not hot, not cold) milk, another lemonade (not from a can, but homemade), or applesauce, or strained oatmeal, hot bread, eggs poached and fried (for the twins). Although she loves her children, her efforts to keep them fed drive her batty—``Creamy oatmeal, pots of it! Homemade bread and lots of it! Peeling apples by the peck, Mrs. Peters was a wreck.'' On her birthday, the kids do the cooking, and from their respective preferences emerges a delicious cake. Hoberman gives this tale a droll rhyme, singsongy and fresh as paint, while Frazee's pen-and-ink illustrations, with a touch of Hilary Knight's chaos to them, mold the story with warmth and mayhem: The Peterses live in a Walden-like setting that grows with the family and mellows over the years. Point taken—the antidote for picky eaters (and for the happy trials of large families) is a good sense of humor. (Picture book. 4-8)"

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

One needn't be a picky eater to revel in Hoberman's (A House Is a House for Me) deft and funny verse about a mother whose seven offspring each insist upon eating only his or her favorite food. Catering to these choosy children (who arrive in startlingly quick succession), patient Mrs. Peters squeezes an endless supply of lemons to make fresh pink lemonade for Lucy, peels apples by the peck to simmer pots of applesauce for Jack and kneads batch after batch of dough to bake """"soft and squishy"""" homemade bread for Mary Lou. Since four others make similar demands on her time, it's no surprise that this kitchen-bound mother grows weary with the passing years, until a serendipitous birthday present brings her a glorious payback. The limber lines and cartoon-like animation of Frazee's (That Kookoory!) chaotically busy illustrations handily match the energy and wit of the text's quatrain couplets; the slightly subdued palette of her colored inks keeps the compositions on the right side of boisterous while also giving the story a comfortably retro feel. This talented artist sets the tale in such a cheerfully frenetic, invitingly cluttered household that kids of all culinary leanings will long to move right in, or, at the very least, visit often. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)