It’s good to see an active girl in medieval times, but this dragon story never really soars.
A bright red baby dragon flies around a village of the European past with a young child chasing after.
Readers first spot the child, cued as a girl with long pigtails, pitching hay into a wagon, but all of a sudden, she is in a castle with a sword at her side. She wears a sleeveless green tunic and gray leggings, and it is hard to tell who she is within the hierarchy of her world. She speaks to the dragon: “Baby dragon, baby dragon, what a fast flight!” Marr uses this admiring, repetitive, rhythmic phrasing throughout the story but lets readers down by following up not with a rhyme but with bland prose text: “Baby dragon, baby dragon, what a big climb! / You scale tall walls and go up so high.” The girl clearly enjoys keeping up with the fun-loving dragon, flying on its back, looking at its treasures, and even cuddling up in its nest, but the text is persistently pedestrian. There is a strong sense of movement in the cartoonlike illustrations, created with both traditional and digital media. The child protagonist is light-skinned; some diversity among the kingdom’s inhabitants is shown in an amusing feasting scene in which the dragon fastidiously eats with the very tip of its tail, a bib around its neck.
It’s good to see an active girl in medieval times, but this dragon story never really soars. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-17525-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
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BOOK REVIEW
The premise is worn gossamer thin, and the joke stopped being funny, if it ever was, long ago.
A fairy tending their garden manages to survive a gaggle of young intruders.
In halting cadences typical of the long-running—and increasingly less amusing—How To Catch… series, the startled mite—never seen face-on in Elkerton’s candy-colored pictures and indeterminate of gender—wonders about the racially diverse interlopers: “Do they know that I can grant wishes? / Or that a new fairy is born when they giggle?” The visual action rather belies the sweetness of the verses, the palette, the bright flowers, and the multicolored resident zebras and unicorns, as after repeated, elaborately designed efforts to trap or even shoot (with a peashooter) the fairy come to naught, the laughing children are escorted out of the garden beneath a rising moon. The encounter ends on a (perhaps unconsciously) ominous note. “Hope they find their way back sometime,” the butterfly-winged narrator concludes. “And just maybe next time they’ll stay!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
The premise is worn gossamer thin, and the joke stopped being funny, if it ever was, long ago. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781728263205
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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