Reading comprehension gets a leg up with this charming new series.
Adventures abound in this first of a beginner book series.
Aimed at the earliest of readers, these endearing comics center on Bitty, a gray rabbit clad in a red-and-white-striped shirt, and Bub, a squirrel with a penchant for purple. Five stories of varying lengths pack in drama, pathos, and humor using minimal words and sentences. The tales involve a race with a surprise ending, a discovery of cookies in the woods, a pet rock (or is it a turtle?), and more. The vocabulary never gets any more complicated than cherry (as when Bub worries that Bitty has taken all the cherry chip cookies, only to find that Bitty has saved one), and Trasler is careful to keep sentences short and to the point. Even the simplest of sequences will maintain young readers’ visual interest with subtle details, like changes to the colored backgrounds during more leisurely paced sequences. The storytelling itself never gets too complex, either, as when Bitty and Bub argue that something in the sky is either a bird or plane (a question answered when Bub is eventually splattered with bird poop). Characters are drawn as simply as they speak, remaining colorful and emotional from beginning to end.
Reading comprehension gets a leg up with this charming new series. (Early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780823459803
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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