An overstuffed tale that will nevertheless wriggle its way into readers’ affections, starring an out-crowd sixth grader and a tiny, worm-like creature who can make anything vanish by eating the word for it. Hatchling Fip’s taste for the printed word may be judged unacceptably “runtly and weakish” by his earthworm clan, but when he munches on an empty thumbtack box, loose papers suddenly avalanche from bulletin boards nationwide. Fip doesn’t stop there; unhappily on her way to being dubbed a SLUG (Sorry Loser Under Ground) by the classroom coterie MPOOE (Most Powerful Ones On Earth), Lerner Chanse spots him sampling an article about a newly discovered star. Learning later that the star has vanished from the skies, she confirms her suspicion by nudging him onto the school lunch menu (no more spinach soufflé—anywhere, ever again). Has Lerner found the way to acceptance—or to universal disaster? Both, as it turns out, though ensuing misadventures ranging from the near-catastrophic—as when Fip nearly eats the word “oxygen” out of her science homework—to the hilarious teach her that her little buddy’s ability is definitely nothing to trifle with. In the end, the universe is saved when a clever bookworm entices Fip to gobble down the words “Fip’s magic.” To drive home the point that actions can have unintended, far-reaching repercussions, Amato trucks in a sackful of side plots, including one wildly tangential tale involving a ruthless businessman who finally gets proper comeuppance for using thumbtacks, manufactured by captive children, to train attack dogs. Several stories bundled together, this amiable cautionary tale, often reminiscent of Clifton Fadiman’s Wally the Wordworm or Mary Haynes’s more melodramatic Wordchanger , makes a promising, if undisciplined, debut. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-8234-1468-X
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
Bishop’s spectacular photographs of the tiny red-eyed tree frog defeat an incidental text from Cowley (Singing Down the Rain, 1997, etc.). The frog, only two inches long, is enormous in this title; it appears along with other nocturnal residents of the rain forests of Central America, including the iguana, ant, katydid, caterpillar, and moth. In a final section, Cowley explains how small the frog is and aspects of its life cycle. The main text, however, is an afterthought to dramatic events in the photos, e.g., “But the red-eyed tree frog has been asleep all day. It wakes up hungry. What will it eat? Here is an iguana. Frogs do not eat iguanas.” Accompanying an astonishing photograph of the tree frog leaping away from a boa snake are three lines (“The snake flicks its tongue. It tastes frog in the air. Look out, frog!”) that neither advance nor complement the action. The layout employs pale and deep green pages and typeface, and large jewel-like photographs in which green and red dominate. The combination of such visually sophisticated pages and simplistic captions make this a top-heavy, unsatisfying title. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-87175-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
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