A marauding band of neighborhood cats of every color invades the house of a red-haired little girl and her tow-headed brother in this amusing easy reader from the talented Holub (The Garden That We Grew, below, etc.). The frolicking felines wreak havoc throughout the house before the children shoo them out, but then the house is a little too quiet and lonely, so the kids invite the cats back to stay under more controlled circumstances. The satisfying conclusion shows the kitties curled up asleep all over the children’s bedroom: “Fat cats purr all day. Our cats here to stay.” Holub uses patterned sentence structures, with rollicking rhythm, rhyming couplets, and repetition of key words providing lots of help for new readers. Delightfully loose watercolors by Davis (Tiny Goes to the Library, not reviewed, etc.) add humorous details and plenty of action, while providing picture clues and exact picture-to-text match. Thoughtful art direction varies the placement of text (appropriate for a reader at the 1.9 level) and encourages left to right flow across the pages. A model for the genre: a funny, satisfying story with solid educational underpinnings. A first choice for most libraries. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89279-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip. The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface. Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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