A cotton-candy graphic idyll
Four small adventures in the life of Long Tail Kitty.
In the first, LTK and his friend Tony, an orange cat, try to go with their elephant friend to a magic show on a robot-run riverboat, but the robobarker says that Big E exceeds the boat’s weight limits. In the second, LTK and Tony go to Big E’s birthday party, and LTK is put out when Big E does not open his present first. On the way home from the party, LTK gets lost when Tony goes on ahead, but he is helped out by new friend Frances. Finally, LTK calms down from the excitement by working in his garden, but Tony, Big E and Frances start a water fight. LTK looks rather like a plump, fanged, six-pointed starfish with a tail rather than a cat, but neither anatomical verisimilitude nor plot is the main event in Pien’s pastel-colored animal world. The solipsistic LTK is marvelously childlike, so concerned with his relationships with his friends that sometimes he doesn’t even notice that he’s having a good time. Big E, befitting his size, operates as the world’s nominal adult, wielding actual, unexplained magic when necessary to make things right, just like a human parent. Pien’s delicately colored panels have all the appeal of a bag of jelly beans, appearing first as an abstract agglomeration of colors and then resolving into the sweetest of narratives.
A cotton-candy graphic idyll . (Graphic fantasy. 4-8)Pub Date: April 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60905-394-9
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Blue Apple
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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