Cinderella, dressed in yella, went downstairs to kiss a fella…
Miss Susie had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell…
Tic-tac-toe, three in a row, Barney got shot by a G.I. Joe…

If you attended elementary school in the United States or Canada in the 1990s, there’s a good chance that you heard these rhymes recited by your peers on the blacktop at recess. In fact, you can probably recite the final lines to yourself, decades later, in exactly the intonation in which you first encountered them.

But how exactly are these rhymes, riddles, and rituals collected and disseminated? Why do they stick with us? How can they span such wide geographic regions? And where in the world do they come from? In And Now The Floor Is Lava, H.B. Eshelman not only answers these questions, but explores the relationship between playground knowledge (known in academia as “childlore”) and the oral traditions and folk wisdom that sustained humankind in the millennia before mass media.