Young children will be happy to find this feline and his wheels again and again.
Things that go, a cat to find, cheerful colors, and slight text make a board book that will engage young readers.
Surprisingly complex scenes created entirely from clay show off a variety of wheeled vehicles: a train, a farm tractor, construction equipment, race cars, a fire truck, and a school bus. Additional vehicles not mentioned in the rhyming text are included on several spreads. Dingeldein draws on her experience as an art clay teacher for young children at her hometown Richmond Art Museum in Indiana, and her own cat modeled for Walter. She makes her own dough, so the colors are more intense than those available from commercial sources, facilitating Walter’s fluid relationship to reality. Readers first meet Walter in a green playroom with a purple, yellow, and black toy train. In the next scene, Walter is aboard a pink and yellow train while passengers wait on a station bench. Walter is on every page—sometimes prominently, sometimes hidden. The rhyming couplets, separated by a page turn, do not always flow. No matter; children will interrupt the verse to study the details and look for Walter.
Young children will be happy to find this feline and his wheels again and again. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-936669-36-3
Page Count: 14
Publisher: blue manatee press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
A perfect piece of treasure it is not, but shiver me timbers, it’s fun.
Two pirates and their parrot companion embark on adventures to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Following Car, Car, Truck, Jeep (2018), Charman and Sharratt team up again for this swashbuckling, musical tale. The two buccaneers and their parrot spend a day at sea engaged in such maritime activities as scrubbing the deck and hoisting the sail along with quintessentially piratical chores like digging up buried treasure. At the end of the day—which culminates in a nonviolent walk across the plank—the two pirates return home. Charman’s rhyming text has a nice cadence, and thanks to the cover note to sing along to the tune of “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat,” it moves along at a nice clip. For the most part, the rhymes work neatly into the tune so that it reads easily the first time through. Sharratt’s black-outlined illustrations are boldly colored and eye-catching. The pirates themselves are not obviously gendered; one presents white and the other has light-brown skin. Most of the ocean creatures have anthropomorphized features—a mostly successful choice with the exception of the jellyfish and octopus, shown awkwardly with humanlike noses and smiles (and, oddly, eyebrows for the octopus). Overall, this one holds high appeal for little readers, and the nature of the singsong-y, rhyming text will make it a highly requested reread.
A perfect piece of treasure it is not, but shiver me timbers, it’s fun. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0319-0
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Short, sweet, and engaging; a sing-along introduction to furry first responders.
“The Wheels on the Bus” gets an extra syllable, a siren, a hose, and a snazzy new ladder.
This variation on the popular children’s song should hit the spot with budding truck aficionados among the diapered set. The text is a straight adaptation of “The Wheels on the Bus,” with firetruck and firefighting themes replacing the sights and sounds of a bus rider’s commute. The siren goes “Woo-woo-woo,” the lights go “Flash, flash, flash,” the riders “hold on tight,” the ladder goes “up, up, up,” and the hose, of course, goes “swish-swish-swish—now, the fire’s out.” The book won’t win awards for originality, but it should be a toddler pleaser. The colors on the cover are an explosion of reflective red foil against a bright yellow background; the interior colors are more muted but still bright and cheery. The firefighters and onlookers are anthropomorphic animals in firefighter costume or civvies, as the case may be. Characters include a racoon, some bunnies, a fox, and a woodchuck, among others, all rendered in an accessible, cartoony style. Between the bright colors and the smiling gameness of the furry firefighters, the proceedings should excite and delight most tots.
Short, sweet, and engaging; a sing-along introduction to furry first responders. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-4244-3
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Little Simon/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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